BEIJING (MNI) – The German government and its banks have reneged on
an agreement to publish full details of the banks’ sovereign debt
holdings as part of the European bank stress tests released Friday,
according to an interview with a top regulator published by the
Financial Times Monday.
“We agreed with all supervisory authorities and with the banks in
the exercise that there would be a bank-by-bank disclosure of sovereign
risks,” Arnoud Vossen, secretary-general of the Committee of European
Banking Supervisors (CEBS), the pan-European bank regulator, told the
FT.
On Friday, CEBS published the results of the stress tests, showing
that only seven of the 91 European Union banks tested failed to maintain
adequate capital under a series of difficult economic and financial
market circumstances. These bank would need to raise Eur3.5 billion to
shore up their capital base, the tests found.
The relatively few banks that failed the test, and the small amount
of the capital shortfall, were well below market expectations, leading
many analysts to criticize the test as insufficiently stringent.
Six of the 14 German banks tested — Deutsche Bank, Postbank, Hypo
Real Estate, mutual groups DZ and WGZ, and Landesbank Berlin did not
publish detailed accounts of their sovereign debt holdings, although
Postbank release some information Sunday. All but one other European
bank tested — Greece’s ATEbank, which failed the test — disclosed
its sovereign debt holdings.
The failure to disclose this information may cause some to suspect
that the German bank had something to hide and risks further undermining
the credibility of the whole stress test exercise.
German officials claim local law prohibited them from forcing the
banks to publish such details.
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