BOV director sues the bank over ‘false declarations and manipulation’

Tista’ taqra dan l-artiklu bil-Malti

Bank of Valletta’s most senior director, James Grech, is alleging ‘lies, manipulation and false declarations’ on the part of senior board officials and bank executives in a lawsuit he has opened against the bank.

Through his lawyer Mark Muscat, Grech filed the lawsuit against the bank where he works and on whose board he sat last month. He is asking the civil court to award him damages over what he claims were unlawful actions taken in his respect.

Despite the lawsuit’s seriousness and unprecedented nature, the bank has not issued a company statement and has kept the development under wraps from its shareholders and the public.

The issue dates back to 2019 when, as part of a new regulatory framework introduced by the European Central Bank, an annual ‘Individual Suitability Report’ had to be carried out by the bank on all individuals forming part of its board of directors.

That report is then passed on to the ECB, the Malta Financial Services Authority and other regulatory authorities for their approval.

BOV had commissioned an unnamed consultancy firm to prepare the report, which included interviews with all board members.

But Grech claims the government-appointed chairman of the time, Deo Scerri, informed him that the regulators had not been satisfied with the result of his assessment and asked him not to recontest his board position at the next shareholders meeting.

Grech ignored Scerri because he suspected the report’s and the chairman’s conclusions were not exactly the same.

Grech was, in fact, confirmed by the regulators just a few months later.

He alleges that he had been subjected to questions unrelated to the ‘suitability exercise’ during the consultancy firm’s interview. He claims the interviewers instead focused their questions on who had been behind the bank’s nomination of a rival consultancy firm for unrelated work.

In his lawsuit, Grech states that he insisted with Scerri’s replacement – new chairman Gordon Cordina and his lawyer Michael Grech – on being informed if the bank had made the contested suitability report available to third parties.

The bank assured him that was not the case and that no one outside the institution had been given a copy.

But to Grech’s surprise, both the ECB and the MFSA confirmed to him some two years later that they had indeed been given a copy of the report by then-BOV CEO Rick Hunkin.

Accusing the bank of unprofessionalism and making deliberate false declarations to the regulators, Grech is asking the court to condemn the bank for breaching data protection laws.

He is also asking for the report and its contents, which, he insists, include falsities, to be deleted and removed from the record.

Grech argues that the bank had given the same unnamed consultancy firm that drew up the report other consultancy work while it was conducting its individual assessments of the board of directors.

Grech, who is also a senior BOV employee, has been on the bank’s board since 2014. He unsuccessfully contested the general elections on the Labour Party ticket last year and was appointed by the government to Gozo Channel (Holding) Ltd’s board of directors only a few months ago.