Bank of Lithuania provides further documents on Snoras bank collapse

The documents provide more details showing that Snoras actually did not own the securities and cash it declared. The documents had been received from Snoras’ bankruptcy administrator, the central bank said.

“Additional documents now provided to the commission unveil with seconds’ precision how and when the assets disappeared from the bank,” Vitas Vasiliauskas, governor of the Bank of Lithuania, said in a press release.

Data earlier provided to the commission by the central bank, Snoras’ temporary administrator, and its bankruptcy administrator proved that decisions taken with regard to the commercial bank were based on solid evidence, he said.

The documents provided to the panel include a 121-pages package of SWIFT system records showing how the securities and cash acquired and managed by Snoras were transferred to private accounts in Swiss banks without paying any fees to the bank.

The central bank said that the documents had been provided in response to a public statement by Valentinas Mazuronis, the panel’s chairman, that the commission had not received the documents that would support the claims that Snoras’ assets had decreased by 4 billion litas (EUR 1.16 b).

Mazuronis told BNS that the documents received from the central bank should not change the situation as such. “In my opinion, it does not change the situation as such,” he said. However, Mazuronis would not forecast how the documents provided by the central bank might affect other panel’s members.

“... We just got some specifications and explanations about one of the fragments. We asked for materials about all points related with the decrease in assets and those documents only relate with those securities,” he said.

The Bank of Lithuania has in total provided more than 100 documents to the commission.

The panel investigating the collapse of Snoras should approve the final conclusion on Wednesday. The findings should be provided to the Parliament by 1 June.

Last week, the panel agreed on essential and preliminary conclusions that the actions taken by the Bank of Lithuania when shutting down Snoras last November were hasty, Mazuronis said.