Seif emphasized that in order to protect people’s deposits the CBI will dedicate credit lines to the depositors based on the value of the available assets of the institutions.
He noted that the uncertified credit institutions are a legacy from previous governments and the CBI has designated credit lines to organize some of these institutions and have so far paid 22 trillion rials (about $586 million) from its resources to Samen al-Hojaj Credit Institution depositors and has guaranteed to pay another 22 trillion rials (about $586 million) in the future.
“CBI has also designated credit line for the insolvent Fereshtegan Credit Institution’s depositors based on the values of its identified assets in order to shorten the process of reimbursing customers’ money,” Valiollah Seif was quoted by IRNA as saying.
He said that these payments are based on the value of the available assets of the institutions and that CBI cannot just allocate resources without providing support for it or it would lead to higher inflation.
Seif also noted that CBI’s goal is to protect people’s deposits by all means. Therefore all the dissolved credit institutions’ available assets and those that will be identified later belong to their depositors and “if there is any shortfall, the institutions’ shareholders will be held accountable”.
He noted that some problems including lack of legal mechanisms to deal with uncertified institutions were inherited from previous governments, when the Law Enforcement Forces, and the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare licensed these institutions to operate while no one thought of the problems they could cause for the market and banking system.
Unlicensed institutions had made it difficult for the CBI to balance interest rates within the legal framework because deposit rates offered by these institutions were always higher and had created grounds for money laundering. Eventually, many of them became bankrupt due to inefficient management and lost a large percentage of their original invested deposits.
