The liquidator of the Romanian Discount Bank is requesting a 5.6 million lei payment from Rafo

• After a five year period in which the company was in bankruptcy reorganization, a lawsuit in which it is unclear who owes money to whom is brought back to the forefront

The Romanian Fund for the Guarantee of Bank Deposits, which has been appointed the bankruptcy trustee of the former Romanian Discount Bank (Banca Romana De Scont - BRS) in July sued Rafo SA Oneşti in order to recover 5.6 million lei from the company. The commercial litigation between the BRS and Rafo was put on hold in 2005, when the refinery had entered bankruptcy reorganization, according to data published in the Insolvency Proceedings Bulletin. At the end of June, the Court of Braşov, decided to end the reorganization of Rafo, and the Bank Deposits Guarantee Fund could once again open the lawsuit which had been suspended five years ago.

Sources from the former management of the BRS claim however that there is no basis for this debt and that it is in fact the bank that owed Rafo 2 million dollars. This hazy situation is apparently due to the faulty appraisals that the bank made after entering bankruptcy, eight years ago. The same sources claim that the amount in dispute should have come from the payments that Dramiral was supposed to make to Rafo, for the fuel traded by the company controlled by Corneliu Iacubov. At the time, Dramiral was the company that handled the distribution of the products of the refinery of Oneşti, and the company performed its payments to Rafo through the Romanian Discount Bank.

At the end of 2001, the owner of Dramiral, Mihai Iacob, entered a direct conflict with the speculator Sorin Ovidiu Vîntu, the main shareholder of the bank, and the disagreement between the two led to one of the largest financial scandals in Romania - the collapse of the Romanian Discount Bank and of the International Development Bank, both owned by Vîntu.

The ending of the judicial reorganization of Rafo led to the company resuming its attempts to obtain state guarantees for the negotiation of a bank loan.

Several months ago, the management of "Rafo" began negotiations with four banks in order to secure a loan, but they could not be completed due to the fact that the issue of the bankruptcy reorganization remained unsolved. "Rafo" needs 330 million Euros to implement the plan to end gas production, and switch to manufacturing products used by the petrochemical industry instead. Recently, the officials of "Goldman Sachs" had several meetings with the managers of "Petrochemical Holding" GMBH, the majority shareholder of "Rafo" Oneşti in order to discuss the available options of taking out the loan.