Banco Occidental de Descuento, Banco Universal, C.A.

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What it is

Banco Occidental de Descuento (BOD), the “Western Discount Bank,” was a Venezuelan commercial bank founded in October 1956 to serve the commercial, oil, and agricultural sectors of the country’s centre-west region. It opened for business on 26 July 1957 with a single branch on Calle Comercio in central Maracaibo and a starting capital of 20 million bolívares divided into 40,000 registered shares.

The bank provided a full range of retail and business services — savings and current accounts, term deposits, loans for tourism, manufacturing, and agriculture, mortgage and commercial credit, credit cards, trust services, and foreign-currency operations. At its peak it operated in 19 of Venezuela’s 23 states.

Who owns it

The controlling shareholder of BOD was Grupo Financiero BOD, itself owned by Venezuelan businessman Víctor Vargas Irausquín. Vargas acquired a majority stake in BOD in 1994 after the collapse of his prior institution, Banco Barinas, during a national banking crisis; at that point BOD operated primarily as a regional bank in Zulia but held significant potential.

No precise ownership percentage was ever disclosed publicly in available filings.

By the time SUDEBAN ordered the asset transfer, the bank’s financial statements showed that its assets were no longer sufficient to offset its liability balances — a balance-sheet hole that made continued private ownership untenable. The August 2024 extraordinary shareholders’ convening notice, published in El Universal, names Iris Morillo Cardozo and Alves Finol García as the court-appointed liquidators managing the wind-down under SUDEBAN supervision; they are now the effective “controllers” of the shell.

Who runs it

Víctor Vargas Irausquín led the bank as president from 1998 until 2022. Since the SUDEBAN resolution of June 2022, operational management passed to the two named liquidators.

Not published: the names of any remaining officers or advisers beyond the two liquidators have not been disclosed in available SUDEBAN or BVC filings.

The money, in plain words

Not published: No annual revenue, net profit, net margin, return on equity, or total-assets figure for any period from 2022 onward has been published on the Bolsa de Valores de Caracas issuer pages, on the SUNAVAL regulator portal, or in any audited report accessible in the public domain. The most recent structured financial data on commercial aggregators (EMIS, Yahoo Finance, EODHD) goes no further than 2021.

The August 2024 shareholders’ convening notice — a primary source drawn directly from El Universal and confirmed against SUDEBAN Resolution 047.22 — shows a patrimonio (shareholders’ equity) of Bs. 2,148,142,210.88 (approximately US$3.03 million at the live rate of 707.92 VES/USD) as of its filing date, and a subscribed capital of Bs.

0.02 — figures that reflect a bank already stripped of its operating assets. Venezuelan banking law (Art.

261 of the Decreto-Ley de Instituciones del Sector Bancario) requires SUDEBAN to supervise the liquidation but does not mandate the public filing of interim profit-and-loss statements for an entity in voluntary wind-down.

What it is doing now

On 17 June 2022, SUDEBAN authorised the transfer of all BOD’s Venezuelan assets and liabilities to Banco Nacional de Crédito (BNC), with all BOD clients becoming BNC clients from 27 June 2022. The formal cessation of BOD’s operations was made official in SUDEBAN Resolution 047.22, published in Official Gazette No. 42,412 on 6 July 2022.

The primary convocation document (El Universal, August 2024) confirms that on 17 September 2024 an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting was called — at Torre La Castellana, Caracas — for two purposes only: to extend the voluntary liquidation deadline beyond the initial two-year window granted by Gazette No. 42,412, and to ratify or replace the liquidators. The bank is now in its extended wind-down phase, with no commercial operations and no new business.

What to watch

• Liquidation deadline: The original two-year wind-down period granted by SUDEBAN expired around July 2024; the September 2024 meeting voted on an extension. Investors still holding BOD shares should watch for a final SUDEBAN resolution formally closing the entity and cancelling its registration.
• Residual claims: SUDEBAN’s own analysis established that BOD’s assets were insufficient to cover its liabilities, meaning equity holders are likely to recover little or nothing; the key question is whether the liquidators can satisfy remaining creditor claims.
• Overseas entities: The BOD Financial Group owns companies across banking, capital markets, and insurance outside Venezuela; the status of those entities — including AllBank Corp. (Panama) and Banco del Orinoco N.V. (Curaçao), both subject to their own regulatory interventions in 2019 — is not covered by the Venezuelan liquidation and remains a separate legal matter for Vargas and the group.
• BVC ticker: The BOD ticker remains listed on the Bolsa de Valores de Caracas, but it represents equity in a shell under wind-down, not a going concern. Any price quoted is a liquidation stub, not a business valuation.

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This is news, not investment advice.