petitioners, the State created a special remedy to help the depositors recuperate their savings. This solution, designed by the State, was an administrative remedy that originated with the adoption of Law 17.613 of December 27, 2002 (Law on Restructuring the Financial System), which introduced norms for the liquidation of financial entities. On December 31, 2002, the Central Bank ordered the liquidation of the Banco de Montevideo and announced that it had created a Bank Capital Recovery Fund. b) Petitioners maintain that they did not consent to offshore transfer of their savings to the Cayman Islands 30. The petitioners argued that consent is one of the core requirements for the validity of contracts. For consent to exist there must have been a proposal from the account executives and managers of the Banco de Montevideo saying, “Your funds are going to be transferred under such and such conditions to a bank separate from the Banco de Montevideo and you must accept...,” and they say that no such thing occurred. Their deposits are held by the Banco de Montevideo, in an account in Uruguay, on stationery with the letterhead of the Banco de Montevideo and signed by officers of the Banco de Montevideo. 31. On September 3, 2003, the petitioners submitted a statement on the 2002 bank crisis made by Senator Julio Herrera, who was on the Uruguayan Senate Treasury Committee. The statement mentioned the difficulty of determining if the funds of the depositors were deposited in the Cayman Islands account with their consent: We created a Commission to conduct a case-by-case study to determine in which situations the depositor had given consent and in which cases the depositor had not given consent to transfer their funds to the account in the Cayman Islands. The Commission was set up and composed of three really first-rate jurists and three persons with impeccable credentials. The months went by and they adopted what I would call a strict interpretation, but there was no other evidence to go on to enable them to adopt a different one, in accordance with Article 31. Then a generic deposit agreement appeared in which the bank was authorized to transfer the funds or to use the funds for different operations. By virtue of that generic agreement it would appear that there was knowledge; we came to realize that the key to the matter lay in what information the Banco de Montevideo gave to those depositors because if you make a knowing and intentional decision, then responsibility is yours. However, it is also necessary to determine if that knowing and intentional decision was based on reasonably accurate, reasonably transparent, and reasonably complete information. As we moved forward -I speak for myself and I know that the same was true of other legislators- we could see that the information provided by the Banco de Montevideo was certainly quite confusing. This is a business venture of the bank, it is the same as the bank, the account is the same, the account number remains the same, the stationery says Banco de Montevideo; in other words there were more elements to confuse the depositor and induce error, than elements to allow us to say that there was a freely adopted knowing and intentional decision. c) The State argues that they should have Commission’s decisions overturned by a Court sought to have the Special 32. The State argued that Uruguayan law provides a special jurisdiction for members of the public to judicially contest acts of the administration that they consider unlawful. That jurisdiction is principally governed by the Organic Law of the Tribunal for ContentiousAdministrative Disputes, which establishes official or administrative, as well as judicial, remedies. Thus, Uruguayan law provides a cause of action to nullify any administrative acts “ordered in misuse, abuse, or excess of power, or in violation of a legal rule.”9 The State argued that the petitioners had the possibility to remedy the allegedly infringed right through a of an Advisory Committee to the Central Bank of Uruguay that refused to recognize the depositors’ status as such. The prosecutor allegedly detected irregularities in the way this Advisory Committee operated. 9 Organic Law of the Tribunal for Contentious-Administrative Disputes, Article 23 (a). 8