BROOKLYN, N.Y. – The chief executive of another billion-dollar credit union called on NCUA yesterday to scrap its $5 billion bailout of the corporate credit union network and urged the federal regulator instead to takeover the corporates.
"Those corporate credit unions have failed on their own, and now they're passing the buck, literally, to have healthy, successful credit unions pick up the tab," said Bogdan Chmielewski, president of Polish & Slavic FCU. "Why should a strong and well-funded 'natural person' credit union like ours, and all the members who are bona fide owners of retail credit unions, be forced to pay for the mistakes that brought down these corporate institutions?"
Chmielewski said he supports the growing call for NCUA take control of the corporate credit union system to avoid further damage to the cooperative insurance fund that all credit unions pay into.
Chmielewski’s criticism comes after the chief executives of Navy FCU, Pentagon FCU and several others called for NCUA to takeover the corporate network to avoid the $5 billion rescue NCUA is engineering.
Navy FCU’s Cutler Dawson urged NCUA to "take immediate control of the corporate credit union system," and to create a separate insurance fund for the corporates, as a way of isolating the problems in the corporate network, that is, an estimated $18 billion of unrealized losses on the books of U.S. Central and seven other corporates.
Polish & Slavic’s Chmielewski also suggested that NCUA "permanently remove and isolate the corporate credit unions from the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund and create a separate insurance fund."
