“Now I am considering the third parties in Switzerland, which we could make the claims to so as to recover the bank’s assets. We cooperate actively with FINMA for this purpose,” Snoras bankruptcy administrator Neil Cooper said in a press release.
The proceedings on the recognition of Snoras’ bankruptcy in Switzerland were launched in March 2012 and took several months since the bankruptcy proceedings opened in foreign countries are not recognized in Switzerland automatically. On 19 July, FINMA acknowledged Snoras’ bankruptcy and initiated and coordinated the bank’s “mini-bankruptcy” in Switzerland.
According to Cooper, this recognition of bankruptcy is relevant for the recovery of around 2.8 million litas in assets held in Snoras’ correspondent accounts in Swiss banks.
FINMA confirmed that it would not take any further legal actions in Snoras’ bankruptcy proceedings and handed all legal claims over to Cooper.
As reported earlier, Cooper’s team located more than 1 billion litas of Snoras’ financial assets in Switzerland which became inaccessible to the bank as a result of complex financial operations.
Snoras' bankruptcy administrator said on Wednesday that around 1.3 billion litas (EUR 3376.8m) of cash had been recovered for the benefit of the nationalized bank's creditors as of 31 October, including 44.5 million litas in October.
"The majority of the cash recovered has come from repayments of capital and interest from the bank's loan book," Neil Cooper said in a press release.
The gross value of the loan book on 1 November was 3.38 billion litas "with an estimated net value after impairment of 1.63 billion litas," he said.
The administrator said that another 600 million litas had been collected from the realization of assets, including the recent sale of Snoras' mini-bank network to Lietuvos Paštas (Lithuanian Post).
The Lithuanian government nationalized Snoras on 16 November 2011. A court opened bankruptcy proceedings against the bank on 7 December.
