East­ern Cred­it Union (ECU) has ex­pressed "great dis­ap­point­ment and con­cern" with a re­cent as­sess­ment from Cari­CRIS, say­ing it in­tends to re­view its con­tract with the re­gion­al rat­ing agency for any po­ten­tial breach­es and avail­able le­gal reme­dies.

On Wednes­day, Cari­CRIS stat­ed it was con­cerned about ECU's fu­ture "sta­bil­i­ty and fi­nan­cial per­for­mance." As a re­sult of this, the ECU was placed on Rat­ing Watch – De­vel­op­ing by the re­gion­al body.

In a re­sponse yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, ECU stat­ed, "Cari­CRIS as­signs cred­it rat­ings, which rate a debtor's abil­i­ty to re­pay debt. It should be not­ed that ECU is a Co­op­er­a­tive So­ci­ety whose mem­bers are its in­vestors and does not re­quire third-par­ty fi­nanc­ing. As such, ECU has no oblig­a­tion or re­quire­ment to par­tic­i­pate in this process. That notwith­stand­ing, ECU en­gaged Cari­CRIS for this an­nu­al sur­veil­lance process on its own as a con­duit to por­tray­ing the strength and the sta­bil­i­ty of the or­gan­i­sa­tion."

One of the ar­eas of con­cern raised by Cari­CRIS was that the ECU was un­co­op­er­a­tive in pro­vid­ing in­for­ma­tion nec­es­sary for it to com­plete its sur­veil­lance re­port.

How­ev­er, the ECU de­nied this.

"ECU has al­ways co­op­er­at­ed with Cari­CRIS’s process and has nev­er re­fused to pro­vide in­for­ma­tion. Fur­ther, ECU will make every ef­fort to con­tin­ue to co­op­er­ate with Cari­CRIS to pro­vide in­for­ma­tion with­in their time­frames. ECU not­ed, how­ev­er, that this last it­er­a­tion of the rat­ing process proved to be dif­fer­ent from oth­er as­sess­ments per­formed pre­vi­ous­ly. ECU had great dif­fi­cul­ty with the process and felt that the process was not per­ti­nent to the Cred­it Union sec­tor," it stat­ed.

It added, "ECU is con­cerned with Cari­CRIS’s de­ci­sion to re­lease this state­ment with­out mak­ing every ef­fort to dis­cuss its con­tents with the or­gan­i­sa­tion as was the usu­al pro­to­col in the past."

ECU slammed Cari­CRIS for al­so choos­ing to utilise "in­for­ma­tion con­tained in news­pa­per ar­ti­cles with­out ver­i­fi­ca­tion."

The cred­it union deemed this "as un­pro­fes­sion­al and con­tributes to a lack of in­tegri­ty of the process."

"ECU cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly de­nies any cur­rent le­gal mat­ters with any ex­ec­u­tive and is un­aware of any in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to its op­er­a­tions. As a con­se­quence, ECU is now con­cerned with any rat­ing that Cari­CRIS ap­plies to any or­gan­i­sa­tion and would re­view our con­tract with Cari­CRIS for any po­ten­tial breach­es and avail­able le­gal reme­dies," it stat­ed.

ECU said it in­tends to host a press con­fer­ence on the mat­ter soon.