Previous articles in this series:
A storefront isn’t a marketplace. But someone forgot to tell the regulator that
Here, two additional chapters are added to the story: the ownership structure of the banking system and the specific perspective from which the regulator itself views the market.
Chapter One: There Are Almost No Local Banks in the Country in the Traditional Sense of the Word
Let’s start with a well-known fact that, for some reason, is rarely mentioned aloud in discussions about financial stability: Moldovan banks are quite profitable. According to data from the National Bank of Moldova (NBM), banks’ profits totaled 4 billion 925.7 million lei at the end of 2025. This is 23.5% more than in the previous year.
In other words, our banks are doing quite well and generating solid profits even when the economy is in much worse shape.
But there’s another well-known fact: virtually all Moldovan banks have foreign owners.
Anca Dragu, Governor of the National Bank of Moldova (NBM), considers this a benefit for Moldova and proof of the stability of the country’s banking system. In May of this year, at the Conference of Central Bank Governors of French-Speaking Countries in Cambodia, she proudly announced that 95% of Moldova’s banking assets are managed by leading European investors.
In other words, the country’s banking system consists of local licenses, local balance sheets, and local brand names—all built on top of foreign capital and a foreign decision-making center.
And there is nothing wrong with that in and of itself. After the theft of a billion from the banking sector, transparent foreign ownership did indeed seem like a sensible remedy—it’s clear who to hold accountable, it’s clear who is answerable to European regulators, and it’s clear where the capital comes from. But there’s another side to the coin, one that’s discussed far less frequently at banking summits.
A side effect of transparency: decisions are made not only in Chisinau
When a bank’s controlling shareholder is based in Bucharest, Budapest, Vienna, Milan, or within the structure of an international financial institution headquartered in London, they by definition have their own logic for allocating capital within the group—a logic that does not necessarily align with the interests of the Moldovan economy at any given moment.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s simply how any international banking group operates: if a regional division in a quiet little country feels more comfortable and secure lending against tangible collateral—such as an apartment, land, or retail sales—than a ten-year industrial project with an uncertain cash flow, then that’s exactly what it will do, regardless of what Chisinau thinks about it.
Decisions regarding risk appetite are made in the same place where decisions on the group’s dividends are made—and that, as a rule, is not Moldova.
And this is where the ownership structure subtly ties in with the very issue of the supply price index discussed in the previous article in this series.
If a bank has a foreign parent company with clear KPIs for return on capital, the safest, most rapidly scalable, and easiest-to-explain asset to shareholders is mortgaged real estate. Not a factory. Not equipment. Not a ten-year export project. An apartment—because an apartment is easy to value (even incorrectly), easy to resell (in theory), and easy to explain to the parent group in a quarterly report.
It’s exactly the same logic that has driven the mortgage portfolio from 8.3 to 27.4 billion lei in five years—the one we’ve already discussed.
Chapter Two: A Regulator That Communicates Mainly with Bucharest
The second part of the picture no longer concerns the banks, but the National Bank itself. The current governor of the NBM, Anca Dragu, was appointed by the Moldovan Parliament in December 2023—with an impressive career built almost entirely in Romania and at the European/international level: the National Bank of Romania, over a decade at the IMF, the European Commission (Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs), the position of President of the Romanian Senate, and the position of Minister of Public Finance of Romania. She is the first woman to serve as Governor of the NBM—and, objectively speaking, she has a resume that any central bank in the world would accept without hesitation.
The problem isn’t the resume. The problem is where an institution headed by someone with such a resume naturally looks to for guidance. One need only glance at the NBR’s public appearances in 2026: participation in the “Bucharest Leaders’ Summit,” a speech at the “ZF Bankers Summit” in Romania, the European Council on Covered Bonds meeting in Norway, and the “EU-Moldova Investment Conference” attended by the European Commissioner for Enlargement.
A recurring theme is the three-notch improvement in the sovereign rating over two years, integration into SEPA, the “European path,” and strengthening the confidence of foreign investors.
All of these are real and, in their own way, useful achievements. But note the audience to which they are addressed. This is language tailored for an investor in Bucharest, a rating agency in London, and an IMF partner—not for a family in Bălți trying to understand why their mortgage has been stretched out over 22 years, or an entrepreneur in Cahul who can’t get a ten-year loan to modernize a workshop.
The external audience is presented with a narrative of stability and integration. The domestic audience gets the ask-price index instead of the transaction-price index, along with an explanation that the increase in mortgage terms reflects strong interest in real estate—not a warning sign.
This isn’t about passports. It’s about who the regulator ultimately reports to de facto.
One caveat is important here, because this is a slippery topic, and it’s easy to slip into cheap nationalism instead of analysis. The issue is not that the head of the NBM or the management of foreign banking groups are “outsiders” in any ethnic or passport-related sense. The issue is the structure of incentives.
An institution whose reputation and legitimacy are built primarily through rating agencies, European partners, and international financial organizations will — quite rationally and without any malicious intent — prioritize precisely those metrics that are visible to this external audience: the sovereign rating, integration into European payment systems, and compliance with EU directives.
Metrics that are visible mainly from the inside—the actual transaction price versus the listed price, the actual household debt burden versus nominal inflation, and the actual availability of long-term credit for local industrialists—end up taking a back seat simply because they are less visible to the external audience and less likely to translate into a higher rating.
The result is predictable: a regulator focused on external credibility and a banking system where the controlling capital makes decisions outside the country are both gravitating toward the same thing —namely, what is easy to measure, easy to sell to investors, and easy to package into a quarterly report.
In other words, toward a showcase. This is precisely why the offer price index turned out not to be a random methodological oversight, but rather a perfectly logical product of a system in which both capital and the regulator’s communications look outward more often than inward.
What can be done about this without resorting to slogans like “we sold the banks to foreigners”?
A return to entirely “domestic” banking capital is not a solution and is not a realistic scenario at all: it was precisely foreign capital and international oversight after 2015 that put an end to the theory that the billion was stolen by insiders. The issue isn’t the shareholder’s passport, but two very specific and solvable problems:
– the regulator must measure and publish what is visible to the domestic audience—actual transactions, not just announcements; the actual debt burden of households, not just average inflation; – regardless of how much this translates into an improved rating from external observers;
– Oversight of exactly where banks with foreign controlling capital direct their loans must explicitly take into account that decisions regarding the group’s risk appetite are not made in Chisinau, and compensate for this with targeted requirements and incentives to lend to the manufacturing and export sectors—rather than relying on the parent company to figure out on its own that a Moldovan factory also needs a loan.
Otherwise, the system will continue to perpetuate itself: outward-oriented capital, a regulator speaking to an external audience, and a domestic market that learns the price of its own apartment from a six-month-old ad.
P.S. As usual, none of the above constitutes investment advice—and certainly does not imply that financial stability must have a specific “passport.”
Dumitru Taraburca,
expert in real estate appraisal and development
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