Ruth Alfaro Jara was appointed as director of the National Bank (BN) despite being one of the members of the Board of Directors of Bancrédito in one of the most critical moments of that public financial intermediary, which went bankrupt after being intervened by Conassif due to bad administration, in 2017.
The Governing Council said that Alfaro Jara was appointed by this administration in the National Directive because Bancrédito’s intervention was not caused by her actions or management. Zapote added that the work of Ruth Alfaro, who was the director of Bancrédito until the end of February 2018, focused on developing a plan to restructure and transform the agonizing Bancrédito.
When nothing worked to rescue the bank, which was finally merged with the Bank of Costa Rica (BCR) last September, she devoted her work to the process of leaving financial intermediation in an orderly manner, according to the Presidency, to the reduction of payroll and the reserve of resources for the payment of labor benefits, as well as the sale of the loan portfolio and the payment to creditors, informed the Governing Council.
Presidential House justified that Alfaro had no responsibility in the pressing situation of illiquidity that fulminated Bancrédito. The entity, according to government authorities, entered that state long before she took office.
On November 30th, 2018, the hundred-year-old bank closed its doors with losses of ¢52 billion, mainly due to the liquidation of a bad credit portfolio. Bancrédito’s story ended with a deficit of ¢ 6.94 billion and losses of more than ¢ 27 billion in 2017.
But the warning lights went on in December 2017, when the institution could not return to the Ministry of Finance almost ¢120 billion that the government of the then president, Luis Guillermo Solís, injected to try to rescue it from bankruptcy.