Commissioner Almunia presented the Commission's decisions on WestLB and Bank of Ireland

20 December 2011

Almunia stressed that the first concern of the Commission is that an aided bank is ultimately viable to avoid it asking for repeated rescues. Rescue and restructuring aid distorts the conditions of competition more than any other aid.

WestLB

In the WestLB case, the Commission was able to approve, with conditions, significant public support already in May 2009. This is a bank whose troubles pre-date the fall of Lehman Brothers and which took excessive risks expanding into structured products at the expense of its regional business. As the bank received significantly more aid after the 2009 decision, its ability to survive in the long term without state support was seriously questionable. The plan finally submitted by the German government together with the Land North-Rhein Westphalia and the savings banks that partly own WestLB is that:

• WestLB will stop all its banking activities;
• Helaba – the Landesbank of Hessen Thüringen – will buy some assets and liabilities, put together in the so-called Verbundbank, which provides services to savings banks; and, finally,
• the remaining assets and liabilities will be sold, and what cannot be sold will be transferred to a bad bank;
• an asset management company will be allowed to operate for a period of time in order to manage the assets transferred to the bad bank, after which it will be sold or liquidated.

Effectively, WestLB will be resolved in an orderly fashion, and the costs of its liquidation will be born by all the shareholders: the Land of NorthRhein Westfalia, the savings banks, and the Bund.

With this decision, the only other ongoing investigation involving a Landesbank concerns BayernLB.

Bank of Ireland

Let me finish with two other decisions, the first approving the restructuring plan of Bank of Ireland. The plan contains a major restructuring effort ensuring that BoI will refocus its business model and will considerably reduce its dependence on wholesale funding. The plan also attracted private investors, significantly limiting the need for public support. Thanks to the fruitful collaboration between the Irish authorities, the bank and the Commission, the plan also includes the necessary safeguards to ensure that competition in the Irish financial markets will be enhanced in the coming years, something I felt was necessary to protect Irish consumers. The efforts of the Irish authorities to implement the programme are starting to pay off, investor confidence is starting to come back and this is very positive.

Full speech

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