French bank BNP Paribas will expand its board of directors by four new members, among them former European Commissioner Meglena Kouneva, according to a report in Bulgarian-language Dnevnik daily on April 8 2010.

The nominations of the four new members will be made on May 12 during a meeting of the bank's shareholders, Dnevnik said, citing the French financial daily Les Echos.

Les Echos said that in her capacity as European Commissioner for consumer protection, Kouneva was very critical about the charges, practices and policies of European banks, including the French ones.

"I have received several offers, including by the European Commission for important policy making, but for the moment I have not replied to any of them," Kouneva told Dnevnik. She also said that as a former European Commissioner, such decisions had to be co-ordinated with the Commission's ethics board.

"I am happy that in my capacity as a commissioner, my efforts have not gone unnoticed," she was quoted by Dnevnik as saying.

In a EC report, it was said that there were numerous problems with European banks, French, Austrian, Italian and Spanish in particular and their ambiguous and inadequate interrelation and poor business conduct with their respective clients.

In particular, retail banks were said to have used information that was misleading and difficult to comprehend, imposing taxes in a way that was not transparent, and giving inadequate advice to customers, Dnevnik daily reported on September 23 2009.

In a speech delivered during the hearing on Responsible Lending and Borrowing in September 2009, Kouneva said: "This topic is not foreign to the European Commission and work to secure responsible lending has already led to the adoption of the Consumer Credit Directive".

"Inadequate financial advice, for example, has not been sufficiently tackled. It has also not helped that a variety of credit intermediaries has been let to operate without many obligations or much supervision".

According to Kouneva, this creates a potentially harmful effects to consumers and to regulators. She reckons that the consumers deserve a simplified or even standardised form or products they can easily handle and understand and not find excessively ambiguous and misleading.

With many Europeans reeling under the pressure of the global economic crunch, "mortgage credits need urgent attention, but at EU level we have so far guaranteed only limited standards of consumer protection in this field. In fact, the only European initiative is the European Standard Information Sheet (ESIS), a standardised information sheet that is not mandatory and therefore not very widespread".