More gain than pain from article 64

Article 64 of Turkey's banking law, which can be invoked to supervise ailing banks, provides sweeping authority over shareholders, including firing the general manager and the board and making demands for a capital injection. But in practice article 64 interventions have ceased to have any meaning. The government cannot or will not get the shareholders to improve the balance sheets of their banks. And the banks have no qualms about being placed under article 64 since the identity of banks affected is not made public.

There are banks that have been under article 64 for more than three years without improving their situations. There are others whose balance sheets have deteriorated even further when the treasury should have seen to it that the opposite happened. There are even article 64 banks that are preparing to go public. But the most bizarre thing about these banks is that they continue to get syndicated loans from international banks although their names are well known to the banking industry.

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