The Antitrust has launched an investigation against Veneto Banca regarding the disbursement of loans conditional on the purchase of the institute's shares.
The Authority announced that it had "initiated an investigation procedure for an alleged unfair commercial practice against Veneto Banca".
“The bank – reads the note issued by the Antitrust Authority – would in fact condition the disbursement of loans to consumers on the purchase by them of their own shares”.
In detail, the question would concern in particular the "shareholder mortgages", which provide for favorable economic conditions compared to ordinary mortgage products. To obtain them, "non-shareholder consumers would have been conditioned to: i) buy minimum blocks of shares in the bank, necessary to become shareholders and to have access to the loan products in question reserved for shareholders and ii) not to sell these blocks of shares, in order to maintain the status of shareholder and consequently not lose the facilitated economic conditions".
This conduct, according to the authority, “could constitute an unfair commercial practice, as it is capable of considerably limiting consumers' freedom of choice in relation to financing products. The undue influence associated with the prospect of being able to obtain financing only by subscribing to securities appears in fact to be qualified as behavior suitable for making a commercial decision that the consumer would not otherwise have taken, and this regardless of the type of information provided on the characteristics and degree of risk of the associated title'.
Today the Antitrust officials "carried out a series of inspections in the Bank's offices, with the help of the special Antitrust unit of the Guardia di Finanza".
