Manageable losses
November 10, 2009
BayernLB announced on Tuesday that it was expecting losses in excess of one billion euros ($1.5 billion) for 2009.
The Munich-based bank said the bad results were mainly due to its flagging Austrian subsidiary, Hypo Group Alpe Adria (HGAA), and that this was likely to impact severely on the fourth quarter.
However, looking at the first three quarters of 2009, BayernLB was able to make good on last year's disastrous results, posting a pretax profit of 367 million euros for the January-September period.
Bank would have failed without aid
The bank suffered losses of about five billion euros in 2008 and would most certainly have failed if the southern German state of Bavaria had not chipped in with ten billion euros.
BayernLB said on Tuesday that it did not require any additional government aid to weather the financial crisis. However, it also said that a recapitalization of HGAA was inevitable.
Struggling HGAA received some 900 million euros from the Austrian government in 2008/2009.
nk/dpa/Reuters
Editor: Jennifer Abramsohn