Santander Totta grants €9Bn in moratoria

Clients of bank Santander Totta have applied for grace periods on loans worth €9Bn.

In all they represent 82,000 families and companies adding up to 25% of all the bank’s personal clients and 40% of all company loans according to data revealed by the bank’s CEO Pedro Castro e Almeida when presenting the bank’s quarterly results.
“If we were in the former world in which capital and interest are paid, it would run into billions of euros paid to September,” said the banker who expects a boost in public support after the summer, meaning the extension of grace periods by six months from 30 September.
“There will be a huge tsunami when we end these moratoria” he warned as the bank has made available sums that are six times greater than usual in moratoria and lines of credit and rejects accusations that the bank is not supporting the economy.
“We have €6Bn available for families and companies. If all were in dire straits we would be witnessing massive demand and we’re not. Moreover, we’re seeing an increase in company and private deposits,” he said.
Regarding Covid-19 credit lines, Santander Totta has approved a total of €1.6Bn in loans or 98% of application to the bank.
Rejected applications were, according to Castro e Almeida, caused by non-compliance of the Government’s own rules, including special recovery processes, overdue loan instalments for more than 90 days or negative results for over three years.
Of this total, €940 million have been approved from mutual guarantee companies, €380 million were formally accepted and another €250 million are being processed with an expected processing completion date within the next two weeks.
And in March alone the bank granted €500 million in new loans that were separate from the lines of credit.
“The approval procedure for lines of Covid-19 credit was not prepared for this avalanche. In the space of one month we’ve had to process as many applications for loans as all the loans that we had processed over the past five years,” said the CEO of Santander Totta.
In the first quarter of 2020 the bank posted profits of €120 million.