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Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Unconventional Kindness: Bank Manager steals money from rich customers' accounts to put in poor customers' accounts

Bank Manager steals money from rich people’s accounts to help the poor

Gilberto Baschiera has lost his job and a house and was also sentenced for two solid years for the kind, but criminal act which earned him a nickname, the “Robin Hood Banker”.

Former manager of a bank in Forni di Sopra, a small town in Italy’s Dolomite Alps has regretted stealing money from the accounts of wealthy savers to help poor savers qualify for loan.

Gilberto Baschiera has lost his job and a house and was also sentenced for two solid years for the kind, but criminal act which earned him a nickname, the “Robin Hood Banker”.

According to odditycentral.com, he took around €1 million ($1.15 million) from rich savers’ accounts, over several years, to help poor people qualify for loans.

The news website reports that Gilberto Baschiera adopted his unconventional banking conduct at the height of the global financial crisis, when banks’ criteria for credit approval assessments changed. It was no longer about an overall assessment of the customer, but about the reliability of the client, which was established at the bank desk, on a computer. 

What the manager did was that, when pensioners and poor people approached him for loan, instead of denying them access due to their obvious inability to pay back, he would take money from the accounts of rich savers and deposit in the accounts of the poor loan seekers to make them qualify for the loan.

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He would then grant them the loans and warn them to make sure they paid according to the terms.

Due to the fact that Forni di Sopra is just a small community of around 1,000 people, many more others heard of the help Gilberto was giving and they wanted to take their share.

 

Unfortunately for him, some of the people defaulted in the loan payments and after seven years his deeds came to light.

Gilberto was sentenced for two years, but upon appeal, his sentence got suspended due to the fact that he did not steal the monies for his personal use ant also, it happened to be his first criminal offence.

His lawyer, Roberto Mete is quoted as having told the BBC that: “He thinks he wouldn’t do it again. He was convinced he could help people. But now he’s lost his job and his own home.

“He wanted to help people who couldn’t access loans the normal way. He created a kind of shadow financing system, he trusted that the people he was helping were going to be able to pay back, and some of them didn’t. He explained to authorities why he had done it, and that he thought the people he was helping would manage to pay back the money”.

Gilberto Baschiera himself is reported to have told La Repubblica, an Italian newspaper that the banking system “abandons pensioners with the minimum and young people without resources. I have always thought that in addition to protecting savers, our task was to help those in need”.

Meanwhile, after losing his job and forfeiting his house to the state, Gilberto has regretted, saying given the chance he would act with diligence in future.

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