An independent audit carried out by consultant Oliver Wyman estimates the Spanish banking sector requires additional capital of 53.745 billion euros to prop up their balance sheets, mainly due to their exposure in the ailing real estate sector. This was announced by the Bank of Spain on Friday.
The central bank reports that without taking into account merger and acquisition processes that are under way and deferred taxes, the total figure amounts to 59.3 billion euros.
The Spanish government has been granted a loan of up to 100 billion euros from its European partners to bail out the banking sector. The consultant carried out stress tests on the country’s 14 main lenders under different adverse scenarios and the results apparently showed that the Spanish banking sector is mostly solvent and viable, even in an extremely adverse and highly unlikely scenario.
Seven Spanish lenders will not require any further capital under an adverse scenario, these being Santander, BBVA, Caixabank, Kutxabank, Sabadell, Bankinter and Unicaja.