Brussels, 02/06/2015 (Agence Europe) - The European Central Bank is considering harmonising the calculation of European bank assets, according to a report in French business newspaper Les Échos on Tuesday 2 June.
The ECB says that a “working group has been established to examine national discretions with a view to informing internal debate on which options may be permissible within the Single Supervision Mechanism supervisory framework.”
Les Échos says the first 'national exception' in the firing line is deferred tax assets, DTA, which boost the capital ratios of Greek, Spanish and Italian banks. DTAs represent the difference between a company's profit and loss for tax purposes and profit and loss for accounting purposes, and are the profits recoverable in future tax years. The aforementioned three countries allow DTAs to be included in bank capital calculations. The Italian press says Italian banks' DTAs total €31 billion.
In an interview with Les Échos, Danièle Nouy, chair of the bank supervisory board at the ECB, said that the way she saw it, there were too many national options when it comes to defining capital in Europe.
The European Commission has been examining the state aid aspects of DTAs for several weeks now (see EUROPE 11289). In April 2015, it said that it had requested information from Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy because these countries provide guarantees for DTAs. It asked for the information in order to understand how the measures work and whether the guarantees amount to state aid. It will no longer be permissible to count DTAs as part of bank capital from 2019 onwards. (Elodie Lamer)