Spanish banks face new reporting requirements

 

Spanish banks have been more candid about their balance sheets than their Irish counterparts and will now be required to publish quarterly reports on bad debt ratios and financing needs, the head of Spain's central bank said here Monday.

Miguel Angel Fernandez Ordoñez commented in a speech at the convention of the Financial Markets Association.

The governor of the Banco de España addressed the challenge of reassuring markets about the solidity of Spanish banks after the crisis that recently forced Dublin to accept aid from the European Union and International Monetary Fund to shore up Ireland's badly wounded financial institutions.

As both Ireland and Spain are suffering from the collapse of massive real estate bubbles, some investors fear Spanish banks with heavy exposure to property loans could suffer the same fate as their Irish counterparts.

Insisting that "the recipe is more transparency," Fernandez Ordoñez said Spanish banks will be required to report every three months in detail on bad debt ratios.

The banks will also have to clearly state their provision for losses and whether they will need outside financing.

"It's necessary to do all this because when the perception of reality is much worse than the reality itself, the best possible reaction is to explain things with all details," the governor said.

Spain's banks have already provided extensive information about their risk exposure "with a degree of detail and transparency notably superior" to that offered by financial institutions in other EU nations, he said.

The value of the property loans the Spanish banks disclosed in July "cannot have changed significantly in three months," Fernandez Ordoñez said.

"Nothing has changed significantly with the rest of the hypothesis and yet, the markets appear to have forgotten that" in the wake of the Irish rescue, he complained.

Three years into the crisis, he said, the Spanish financial system "has endured reasonably well," with only two small banks' going into receivership and a small amount of government aid to the sector compared with other countries.