CORPORATE GOVERNANCE DEVELOPMENT IN THE MOLDOVAN BANKING SECTOR.

Corporate governance is becoming increasingly important and noticeable in the banking system of the Republic of Moldova. The existing serious weaknesses in the national regulatory environment and the ineffective corporate governance in banks of the Republic of Moldova, which led to the famous bank fraud of 2014, have committed the national authorities of the Republic of Moldova to take significant steps in enhancing the corporate governance framework in the banking sector by initiating in 2015 the reform of the national banking legislation. In this context, with the entry into force on January 1, 2018 of the new banking law, the banking sector in Moldova has undergone a major transformation process by implementing a comprehensive set of provisions on corporate governance. To date the current state of corporate governance in the banking sector of the Republic of Moldova and the correlation between corporate governance in banks since 2018 and the performance of the sector have not yet been sufficiently studied. In this context, this paper proposes an analysis of current corporate governance practices and mechanisms in Moldovan banks and the correlation between the quality of corporate governance and bank performance through quantitative and qualitative indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]