ECONOMY

Teiresias to track letters of guarantee

Teiresias, the electronic database for insolvent borrowers, is to start monitoring letters of guarantee in a bid by the Finance Ministry to keep track of their daily volume and crack down on fraud.

Letters of guarantee constitute a significant gray area in the issue of the funding of the economy, because despite the fact that they are an official form of lending there is no clear picture of their precise annual volume. How they will be reflected in figures will follow the same methods used for monitoring the loans, credit cards and cheques of taxpayers and enterprises, effectively completing the profile of corporations’ credit capacity.

This application is also expected to prove useful to the state as a great number of letters of guaranteed are issued for projects tendered by ministries or local and regional authorities. A record of all letters of guarantee would also allow public entities to ascertain whether those presented to them are genuine. This measure is further expected to contain fraud and to help identify criminals whose main activity is issuing fake letters of guarantee, inflicting millions of euros of losses on the state.

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