The authority withdraws the authorisation of a bankrupt broker after 26 months: the policy taken out through it stays valid

The decision does what had to be done, at the end of a road much longer than the one it demands of its addressee. The figures in the act show that by themselves. The company told the authority on 12 July 2024 that it had applied for insolvency proceedings to be opened, and the Bucharest County Court withdrew its right to manage its own affairs on 17 July 2024. The permanent control report that started the penalty procedure was drawn up on 9 July 2026, that is 727 days later. In the same act the firm is given 7 days in which to answer that report, a period coming from Article 34(2) of ASF Regulation no. 4/2021. The ratio between the two is almost 104 to 1. The rest of the road was quick: 35 days from the report to the note of proposals of 13 August 2026, 20 days to the meeting of the Council of 2 September 2026, 13 days to the signing of the decision and another 14 to publication.

The observation that does not show on a reading of the act from end to end concerns the limitation clock. Article 28(21) of Law no. 236/2018 provides that the imposition of penalties is time-barred 6 months from the date the deed is established, but no later than 3 years from the date it was committed. The date of establishment is, in this file, the control report of 9 July 2026, so the 6 months only began to run then, and the penalty of 2 September 2026 fell comfortably within the period. If the day on which the authority learned about the insolvency, 12 July 2024, had counted as the date of establishment, the 6 months would have closed on 12 January 2025, 543 days before the control report. In other words, the moment at which the authority’s own limitation clock starts depends on the date on which it decides to draw up the act of establishment. As for the 3-year ceiling, the penalty was imposed 777 days after the entry into bankruptcy, that is at 71% of the 1,095 days the law leaves as a limit. Against that background, the assessment in the act, that the duration of the breach was medium, is hard to follow: if 26 months are a medium duration, it is not clear what a long one would be.

The second observation concerns the client, who appears in this act exactly zero times. The decision directly concerns the person holding the policy, because it takes away his intermediary, yet it never addresses him. The contrast with the decisions on withdrawal at the firm’s request published on 17 September 2026 is instructive. There, Article 30(1)(b) of Norm no. 22/2021 obliges the authority to check, before approval, that the clients have been informed and that the settlements with the insurers are closed. Here, the removal is made on the basis of Article 30(2), which refers to Article 28 of the law and repeats none of the checks. The result is counter-intuitive: the client of a firm punished for serious breaches receives less care than the client of a firm that closes down in an orderly way. Since the firm has been bankrupt since 2024 and has held no professional insurance since November 2024, these are precisely the clients who would have needed to be told.

The third point is one of legal technique, but with an effect on how readable the act is. Both deeds held against the firm are, in the very wording of the decision, conditions of authorisation which the company no longer meets. The law has a letter written for exactly this case: Article 28(1)(f) of Law no. 236/2018 penalises the failure to observe the conditions imposed on authorisation under Article 9(1), (2) and (4). The decision invokes it in neither of the two cases. The first deed goes under letter (c), which concerns the carrying on of the activity, the second under letter (a), which is the most general formula in the whole list. The penalty comes out the same, because all three letters are in the enumeration in paragraph (3), so nothing changes for the firm. It changes for whoever reads: the classification no longer shows the nature of the breach, and two findings of the same kind receive two different legal bases in the same act.

A word about the series, with the basis stated plainly. Our archive covers the Official Gazette of Romania from 2 July 2026 onwards, that is 89 days, not the whole year, so we have not counted how many withdrawals of authorisation the authority has ordered in 2026. What can be said is that, within this window, these are the second series of withdrawals of a broker’s authorisation to reach the Gazette and the first that is a penalty rather than a voluntary exit. And the authority’s own numbering has advanced by 18 positions in 6 days, from Decision no. 965 of 9 September 2026 to Decision no. 983 of 15 September 2026. Those numbers cover all the decisions issued by the Council, across all the supervised sectors, not only withdrawals, so the figure says something about the pace of the institution, not about how many brokers have left the market.

What should be changed

• Add to the withdrawal decision an article about the contracts in force. A single paragraph saying that policies stay in force with the insurer and that premiums paid through the broker are deemed transferred from the moment of payment, referring to Article 11(4) and (5) of Law no. 236/2018. The practical effect: the client who reaches the text of the decision gets the answer there, instead of hunting for it in the law or hearing at second hand that he is no longer insured.
• Require the clients to be informed on a withdrawal by way of penalty too, not only on a voluntary one. It would be enough for Article 30(2) of Norm no. 22/2021 to refer to the checks in paragraph (1)(b) also where the removal is ordered on the basis of Article 28 of the law, with the judicial liquidator as the addressee of the duty when the firm is bankrupt. In practice, the clients of a firm taken out of the market for breaches would hear it from the right source.
• Write into the decision the date of communication, from which it takes effect. Article 28(15) of Law no. 236/2018 ties the effects to communication, and the published text does not contain that date. The practical effect: it would be possible to check from the act whether a contract concluded by the firm between 15 and 29 September 2026 was or was not concluded by an intermediary that still held an authorisation.
• Align the period for changing the name with the right of challenge. The 15 days in Article 30(3) of Norm no. 22/2021 ought to run from the expiry of the period for challenging the decision, not from publication. In practice, the firm would no longer carry out a measure before it had been able to use its right to challenge it, and the trade register would no longer receive amendments that might have to be reversed.
• Classify the failure to meet the conditions of authorisation under Article 28(1)(f), the letter written for it. The practical effect: two deeds of the same kind would receive the same legal basis, and whoever reads the authority’s decisions could count, letter by letter, how many penalties come from the loss of the operating conditions and how many from the way the activity was carried on.
• Rewrite Article 11(1)(f) of Norm no. 22/2021 as a continuing condition. The present text requires the firm not to have been bankrupt „la data solicitării înregistrării”, at the date the registration was applied for, and its permanent character emerges only from Article 22(1). In practice, nobody would be able to argue, in a challenge, that it breached an entry condition which it did meet on entry.