Less than a week after top-tier managers were rounded up in another high-profile police swoop targeting banking corruption, Novo Banco’s man-at-the-helm has said all is fine and dandy.
Talking to journalists at a banking forum in Lisbon on Monday, Eduardo Stock da Cunha (pictured) said: “Everything that went on last week had zero influence on the functioning of the bank.”
And he stressed that “there will be no more surprises” linking the new institution with its disgraced ancestor BES.
In fact, Novo Banco is well on the way to recovering any lost business, he affirmed, while its assets are in the region of €70 billion.
Stock da Cunha, flown in from the UK to groom the ‘rescued’ bank for sale in the aftermath of the BES debacle, is expected to present Novo Banco’s first financial report later this week.
According to SIC TV news, the bank is now well on the way to becoming “the third largest bank in the Portuguese financial system, after CGD and Millennium BCP”. But whether the spin will hold up long enough to see the bank sold off to recoup the €3.9 billion bailout – largely financed by Portuguese banks – remains to be seen.
Stock da Cunha told the forum on Monday, Novo Banco will not be “sold off in parts”, but he qualified the statement by adding: “That’s not to say an asset won’t be singled out and there could be an exceptional situation for it to be sold on its own.”
Meantime, PJ police overseeing multiple investigations into banking corruption on a phenomenal scale were reported to have seized over five million documents from Novo Banco’s headquarters last week – at the same time naming top-level managers at the bank as defendants. At the forum on Monday, a row of empty seats bore solemn witness to the executives’ recent fall from grace.
Novo Banco affirms its latest ‘scandal’ has “zero” effect on recovering business
