San Marino. Banca Cis case, lawyer Pagliai speaks: “It’s not the account holders who can leave those who fled with the loot”
Ex Cis: “It’s not the account holders who can leave those who fled with the loot”. Attorney Pagliai speaks: “Now we await the ECHR, but we are open to dialogue”
DAVID ODDON – It’s news these days that the San Marino account holders’ committee filed an appeal in Strasbourg with the European Court of Human Rights. To understand what it is about and clarify things, we interviewed the lawyer Stefano Pagliai of the Florence Bar, who legally represents account holders. (…)
You clearly contest the law which allowed the conversion into securities. However, isn’t it possible to go to the Strasbourg Court only after having experienced each internal level of judgment? “The conversion took place by virtue of a law provision. The San Marino legal system, like the Italian one, provides for cases of direct appeal to the Guarantor Board – the only one that can express itself on the legitimacy of a legislative provision – but which are not reserved to individual citizens. In these cases the jurisprudence of the Court has repeatedly expressed itself in allowing access to the judgment without the need to have recourse to the internal remedies which, for individuals, are not immediately accessible”.
Don’t you think that if the State of San Marino has taken such a decision, it has done so to guarantee the stability of the system and therefore to protect the citizens and current account holders themselves? “I understand that obviously there is the issue of guaranteeing the tightness of public finances but, I insist, to these citizens – from San Marino but also from Italy – ‘it was the State’ – excuse the pun – that promised and guaranteed certain things. Finding a new balance, after activating the channels of dialogue, was possible but a unilateral intervention implemented in the ‘Cesarini area’ was preferred. The 3-year wait for the resolution plan has now become 13! More than a change, this is a betrayal of the guarantees provided and always confirmed from 2019 to June 2022 “.
In all this chaos, the feeling is that usually the so-called “financial pirates”, those who created the instability and who are the real culprits, always get away with it. Instead, those who pay are citizens, but also the government themselves who must find a solution to these problems. What do you think about it? “You are absolutely right and I thank you for the question to clarify a point. The most angry – to put it mildly – with those responsible for the bankruptcy of Banca Cis are the former current account holders. They are the ones who are paying for the most significant damages of what happened. This, however, cannot mean that account holders can and should be the ones to identify or single out who ‘fled away with the loot’, if you pass me this expression. The competent institutions, the Judiciary and the Central Bank in primis, must take care of this. I go back to the starting point: the State had guaranteed reimbursement on the basis of certain criteria and guarantees to innocent savers who certainly cannot be held guilty of having deposited their savings with an institution which, until 2019, was duly authorized to collect and management”. (…)
Article taken from La Serenissima