Hints and tips:
...An earlier attempt to usher in consolidation failed when Helaba walked away from merger talks with struggling Landesbank NordLB, based in Hannover....
...Helaba, the Landesbank for the German state of Hessen, reported a fall in profit for the first six months of 2017 amid intense competition and thin interest margins and warned of a “significant fall” in...
...They used £396m of debt from a five-bank consortium led by BayernLB and also including DekaBank, Helaba, ING and LBBW....
...The only Landesbank not to receive state aid was Helaba, which has long been more risk-averse due in part to its80 per cent savings banks ownership....
...That will widen the gulf further between the stronger and the weaker of the five Landesbanks left in Germany after the financial crisis: Frankfurt-based Helaba and Stuttgart-based LBBW last week both reported...
...Hans-Dieter Brenner, chief executive of Helaba, a Frankfurt-based Landesbank, last year likened Mittelstand business to a train that not all banks could get aboard....
...“The flight into supposedly safer assets such as property is being reinforced by the lack of investment alternatives,” says Stefan Mitropoulos, an analyst at Helaba, a German bank....
...While that looks like progress in cleaning up the Landesbank sector, analysts say it is still short of the level of efficiency needed....
...A further €40bn portfolio is due to be taken over by Frankfurt-based Helaba, in a small step to consolidate the Landesbank sector....
...Mr Voigtländer failed to engineer a consolidation with other Landesbanken but a deal was last year struck to transfer some WestLB assets and jobs to Helaba, a rival Landesbank....
...Officials also said Berlin was bracing to help NordLB, Helaba and WestLB, three public-sector Landesbanken....
...Dietrich Voigtländer, WestLB’s chief executive, said the decision meant “significant and painful job cuts”, with about 400 staff being transferred to rival Landesbank Helaba and a planned workforce of 1,000...
...Nor is Commerzbank the only German lender obliged to raise capital by June: Deutsche Bank, NordLB, Helaba, WestLB and DZ need to raise a combined €7.8bn....
...Two Landesbanken, NordLB and Helaba, were assessed with gaps of €2.5bn and €1.5bn respectively, mainly because injections had not taken place by the EBA deadline....
...NordLB, another Landesbank, also scrambled in April to make commitments to adapt its capital to meet the EBA’s definition. NordLB said:”We expect to pass the stress test....
...Helaba is owned by savings banks in the German states of Hessen and Thuringen as well as by those states’ governments....
...In the end, everyone backed down and published, with the exception of Helaba, the German Landesbank. But the quality of the disclosed data appears patchy....
...They and Helaba have until the end of the year to remedy the capital shortfall....
...A study by Helaba, the Frankfurt-based public sector bank, counts more than 150 foreign banks active in Frankfurt and a further 40 with representative offices....
...Three Landesbanken – NordLB, Helaba and WestLB – as well as DZ Bank, the country’s largest mutual bank, also need capital....
...Helaba, another Landesbank, excluded itself from the tests this week rather than be judged to have failed after it did not get the EBA to agree to its plan to toughen up €1.9bn of its hybrid capital....
...Two Landesbanken – Hannover’s NordLB and Frankfurt’s Helaba – will be the hardest hit, though NordLB is negotiating a plan to convert some of the state’s silent participations into full-blown equity....
...Recent speculation has centred on a possible tie-up of WestLB and Helaba – which held talks in 2008 – that could also bring in NordLB and Deka, a fund manager owned by savings banks....
...While this process will evolve in stages, one can envision a world in which even the two state banks that are considered relatively stable – Helaba and Nord LB – would be privatised....
...the troubled Landesbank....
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