Germany approves bank reform to protect taxpayers

The new rules will bar direct lending and provision of guarantees to hedge funds and private equity funds by retail banks through the use of clients' capital deposits

Germany has approved new measures to rein in high-risk financial business of banks and to decouple them from retail banking as part of a comprehensive reform to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis five years ago and to minimise the costs for taxpayers if banks were to be bailed out in the future.

 

The Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, on Friday voted with the majority of the ruling conservative-liberal coalition a legislation, which will require banks with assets exceeding 100 billion euros (130 billion $), or 20% of their balance sheet, to separate their risky trading activities from the traditional client banking and to put them in independent subsidiaries until 2016.

 

The new rules, which are scheduled to come into force in early 2015, will bar direct lending and provision of guarantees to hedge funds and private equity funds by retail banks through the use of clients' capital deposits.

 

Banks will have to finance highly speculative businesses with their own resources and to transfer high frequency trading as well as lending to hedge funds and other holding companies to the proposed subsidiaries, the legislation said.

 

Banks have been asked to identify by mid-2015 their risky trading activities which made them vulnerable and thereby raised the need to separate them from traditional banking and to work out concrete plans to bailout or restructure the lender in the event of an insolvency.

 

Those measures are intended to make sure that chaotic rescue efforts for the so-called "system relevant" banks, which had cost billions of euros to the taxpayers in the past years, will not be repeated.

 

Bank managers who deliberately violate the new rules and endanger the stability of their financial institutions could face jail terms up to five years, according to the legislation.

 

Hailed by the government as a milestone in reforming the banking sector, the legislation was rejected en masse by the opposition parties, which criticised it as "insufficient".

 

During a debate a debate in the Bundestag before the vote, leaders of the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Green party and the Left party argued that the threshold of 100 billion euros assets is "too high" and only the largest banks such as the Deutsche Bank, the Commerzbank and the Landesbank Baden Wuerttemberg will be affected by the new rules.

 

They also expressed fears that "greedy" business practices of banks will be kept by the parent institutions.