Lawmakers hit out at ECB as bad loans standoff hardens

FRANKFURT: The head of the EU Parliament’s influential economic affairs committee has urged the European Central Bank to “correct” its stance on bad loans, adding to a backlash against attempts to clean up soured credit.
Roberto Gualtieri’s comments echoed concerns expressed by the parliament’s president Antonio Tajani this week, in what is emerging as the biggest challenge yet to the ECB as banks supervisor.
At the center of the dispute is how best to tackle banks’ bad loans, which stand at more than $1 trillion, a thorny issue that has divided euro zone countries and is now driving a wedge between the ECB and the EU’s parliament.
The ECB recently announced timelines to set aside money for losses on new loans that have gone roughly three months unpaid, angering EU lawmakers, who are trying to draft their own rules on soured credit.
“I share the concerns expressed by President Tajani,” Gualtieri said. Lawmakers want the ECB to first wait for the EU parliament before introducing such rules.
“I hope ... the consultation process will help the SSM (banks supervisor) to ... correct its guidance in order to make it more balanced.”
Both Tajani and Gualtieri are Italian but their views, unusually, are shared by some Germans. Italy and Germany clashed over Rome’s handling of its banking crisis, with Berlin pushing for tougher treatment of those banks’ creditors.
Markus Ferber, vice chair of the economic and monetary affairs committee and an influential member of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats party, accused the ECB of overstepping its powers.
“I ... think that the ECB went beyond its mandate and in my opinion that undermines confidence in the work of the ECB as a supervisor,” Ferber told Reuters.
“The ECB tried to come up with universal new capital requirements. Such universal rules, however, should be a prerogative of the European legislator.”
The remarks came as rating agency Moody’s warned that the ECB drive could hurt the credit standing of banks in countries with many problem loans.
“This could cause problems for some firms, especially for those that do not have large capital buffers,” said Moody’s Alain Laurin.