Latest news with #Euribor
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Report on the unaudited financial performance of the bank during the first quarter of 2025
Urbo bankas UAB, company code 112027077, address: Konstitucijos pr.18B, Vilnius. Urbo Bankas earned a net profit of EUR 1.2 million in the first quarter of 2025. At the end of the first quarter of this year, the loan portfolio of Urbo Bankas reached EUR 438.9 million, an increase of 34.7% compared to a year ago. The bank's net interest income increased by 7.3% to EUR 5.8 million. Deposit volumes grew by 17.9% over the same period to EUR 576.4 million. 'The favourable economic situation – low inflation, a steadily declining Euribor interest rate and still positive business and consumer expectations – has also led to an increase in borrowing volumes. The growth trends in consumer and mortgage lending in the retail segment continue to be stable, while the number of investment projects carried out by farmers and small and medium-sized enterprises is also growing consistently,' says Marius Arlauskas, Head of Administration of Urbo Bankas. According to him, the lower profit was due to the varying dynamics of interest income and expenses, increased investments in the development of electronic payment systems and new premises in some of the bank's branches, as well as a decline in the volume of non-core activities. In the first quarter of 2025, the bank's net fee and commission income decreased by 22.2% to EUR 0.7 million compared to the same period last year. Net profit on foreign currency transactions decreased by EUR 100 thousand to EUR 0.4 million in the comparable period due to the contraction of the foreign exchange market in Lithuania. 'The performance indicators for the first quarter clearly point to both the overall financial trends and the bank's priority areas of activity. For example, the declining number of foreign currency transactions indicates that the need to conduct foreign exchange transactions in cash is declining in the market, the shrinking of premium collection revenues signals that these activities are moving to the electronic space, and the growth of loan and deposit portfolios shows the potential of businesses and individuals to both borrow and accumulate funds,' says Mr. Arlauskas. The total assets of Urbo Bankas at the end of Q1 2025 amounted to EUR 668.5 million, or 15.9% more than a year ago (EUR 576.5 million). The bank's shareholders' equity increased by 9.2% year-on-year to EUR 63.8 million. At the end of March this year, Urbo Bankas had 279 employees, and its customer service network consisted of 25 territorial branches. For more information please contact: Julius Ivaška, Head of Business Division, tel. +370 601 04 453, e-mail media@ Unaudited Financial Statements_2025-03-31
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Rate 'rigging' traders say they were scapegoated - now the Supreme Court will decide
The Supreme Court is poised to rule on the cases of two former City traders jailed for rigging interest rates, amid concerns raised by senior politicians that there may have been a series of miscarriages of justice. If the traders are successful in their application - which is opposed by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) - it could lead to the quashing of all remaining convictions secured in nine criminal trials. Tom Hayes, a former trader at the Swiss bank UBS, became the first banker to be jailed for "rigging" interest rates in August 2015. He was accused at the age of 35 by the United States Department of Justice and the Serious Fraud Office of being a "ringmaster" of an international fraud conspiracy and sentenced to 14 years in jail. Together with former Barclays trader Carlo Palombo, he is now awaiting a crucial Supreme Court judgement. Hayes and Palombo were among 37 City traders prosecuted for "manipulating" the interest rate benchmarks Libor and Euribor, which track the cost of borrowing cash between the banks and are used to set the interest rates on millions of mortgages and commercial loans. In criminal trials on both sides of the Atlantic from 2015 to 2019, 19 were convicted of conspiracy to defraud and nine were sent to jail. As they served time, evidence emerged that central bankers and government officials across the world, including a top adviser at 10 Downing Street at the time, had pressured banks such as theirs to engage in very similar conduct to what they were jailed for – but on a much greater scale. No central banker or government official was prosecuted. Then, soon after they were released after serving their full jail tariffs, a US appeal court decided such conduct wasn't a crime after all; nor even against any rules. The US Department of Justice revoked the charges against Tom Hayes, and the US courts then threw out all similar convictions. Yet in the UK, they remain convicted criminals. The Serious Fraud Office, which prosecuted the cases, says the defendants were convicted of conspiracy to defraud and points to a number of previous unsuccessful attempts to overturn convictions at the Court of Appeal. The Supreme Court's now being asked to decide if judges were wrong to tell juries their conduct was unlawful. If it does so, it could lead to the overturning of all remaining convictions, throwing a global 17-year scandal into reverse. It's also likely to prompt renewed calls for a public inquiry into evidence of much larger interest rate "rigging" – ordered from the top of the financial system by central banks and governments worldwide. This is the first time the cases have reached the Supreme Court following public pressure from senior politicians, including former shadow chancellor John McDonnell and former Brexit Secretary David Davis. They have told the BBC they're concerned the traders have been "scapegoated" in a scandalous series of miscarriages of justice that runs "deeper than the Post Office". They want a public inquiry. What the FTSE 100 or the Dow Jones are to share prices, Libor is to interest rates: an index, updated every day, that tracked the cost of borrowing cash between the banks from 1986 until 2024. Each day at 11am, 16 banks across London would answer a question: at what interest rate could they borrow money? Before answering, traders on the banks' cash desks would look at the range of interest rates at which other banks on the market were offering to lend cash, which normally differed from each other by just one or two hundredths of a percentage point (e.g. HSBC offering to lend funds at 3.14%, Bank of China at 3.16%, JP Morgan at 3.15%). Each bank would then select a rate from that range of offers to submit as their answer. An average would then be taken to get the official benchmark, Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate). A similar process was used to get Euribor, the equivalent of Libor for euros. The evidence against Hayes and Palombo were messages they had sent to the cash traders asking them to select a 'high' or 'low' rate from that range, depending on what might benefit their banks' trades – which went up or down in value linked to Libor (or Euribor). Their requests might make no difference to the average; or they might nudge it very slightly in their bank's favour – up or down by no more than one eighth of one hundredth of a percentage point (0.00125%). But it was seen as worth the effort of making the requests, which had been industry practice for years, in case it might help their bank make more money or lose less. Prosecutors alleged Hayes was dishonestly seeking to manipulate the Libor rate to benefit the bank's trading positions and therefore his bonuses while "cheating" others trading on the market, "motivated by pure greed". The SFO accused Palombo of being a "crook" and a "cheat" who had "left his moral compass at home". The traders protested that any potential gains to their bonuses from a nudge to Libor of a maximum 0.00125% were far too little to motivate a criminal conspiracy. What they saw as the clerical task of choosing 'high' or 'low' rates based on the commercial interests of the bank - was merely what every bank had done since the 1980s, long before they started work. But according to the SFO, it was interest rate "manipulation" that amounted to evidence of an international conspiracy to defraud. At his 2015 trial, Hayes said he had not asked for any false answers to be given to the Libor question – but merely tried to ensure his bank selected a commercially advantageous rate from the range of accurate interest rates at which it could genuinely borrow. But the judge, Mr Justice Jeremy Cooke, decided that any attempt to take into account commercial interests when submitting a Libor rate was "self-evidently" unlawful. Sentencing Hayes to 14 years, he dismissed the argument that it was City practice. "The fact that others were doing the same as you is no excuse, nor is the fact that your immediate managers saw the benefit of what you were doing and condoned and embraced it, if not encouraged it.[…] The conduct involved here must be marked out as dishonest and wrong and a message sent to the world of banking accordingly." The defendants say court rulings retrospectively criminalised not only their actions years before, but also those of senior bankers and civil servants, much higher up the financial pecking order, who had sought to influence Libor on a much greater scale. Audio recordings, documents and data uncovered by the BBC indicate that in the 2008 financial crisis, governments and central banks from the Bank of England to the Banque de France and Banca d'Italia pressured banks to push Libor and Euribor down artificially in order to make real interest rates appear lower than they were and quell speculation about banks' solvency - a highly commercial motive. The difference, though, was that whereas the traders were asking for shifts of one hundredth of a percentage point, the central banks sought moves up to 50 times the size, giving rates that were obviously false, far away from the range of interest rates where cash was being borrowed or lent on the money markets. In a BBC Radio 4 podcast series exposing the scandal, The Lowball Tapes, Palombo asks despairingly, "If that's not criminal, how can I be a criminal?" Contemporary emails and phone transcripts, official interviews by the FBI and first-hand accounts of witnesses point to the involvement of top officials at Downing Street and the Treasury. They were not shown to the juries at the traders' trials. Palombo describes his life since being prosecuted as a "Kafka nightmare" where he could barely understand the accusations made against him, with no sense of having done anything even vaguely wrong. To him and to Hayes, one of the most serious implications is that what happened to them could happen to anyone in the workplace - to them, if normal commercial practice can be retroactively criminalised, no-one can be sure that the daily tasks they're currently engaged in at work won't, in years to come, be condemned and prosecuted. The Treasury has said it did not seek to influence individual bank Libor submissions. The Bank of England has said Libor was not regulated at the time. The Banque de France, Banca d'Italia and the Federal Reserve have declined to comment. In the traders' cases the Court of Appeal, led by judges including Lord Chief Justice John Thomas and Lord Justice Nigel Davis, blocked the path to the Supreme Court five times from 2015 to 2019. In 2021, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) initially said it would turn down Hayes's application. But then in January 2022 a US appeal court fully acquitted two former Deutsche Bank traders, Matt Connolly and Gavin Black, saying prosecutors had failed to produce any evidence they had asked for false rates to be submitted at which their banks could not borrow. All US convictions for 'rigging' Libor were subsequently thrown out. The pair had initially been convicted in 2018 on similar charges to Hayes and Palombo. The following year, the CCRC was persuaded to change its mind. In 2024, Court of Appeal judges certified, for the first time in these cases, that there was a point of law of general public importance at stake, finally clearing the path to the Supreme Court. Two months ago, the Supreme Court heard arguments that judges in the lower courts had told juries that Hayes and Palombo's requests were wrong as a matter of law – when it should have been left as a matter of fact for the jury to decide. The SFO told the court the defendants didn't challenge the jury directions at the time. Hayes and Palombo now await the Supreme Court's judgement. Jailed bankers appeal 'must' go to top court Jailed bankers appeal rate 'rigging' convictions Warning jailed bankers ruling could hit loan rate
RTÉ News
19-05-2025
- Business
- RTÉ News
Switching could save mortgage holders €7,300
New figures show that the average new mortgage drawn down has surged by 82% over the past decade. The latest Mortgage Switching Index shows that mortgage drawdowns have soared from €189,940 in 2015 to €341,078 in the first three months of this year. said the jump reflects an equivalent increase in the country's escalating property prices and it also means that any shift in interest rates is now having a dramatic financial impact on borrowers. The online broker noted that for switchers, the gap between the market's highest and lowest rates now exceeds €7,300 and the gap between the highest and lowest mortgage rates in the market now stands at 3.15%. For a borrower with the average mortgage of €341,078, this equates to a saving of €611 per month - or over €7,338 per year by switching from the highest to the lowest rate. also noted that despite a rebound in switching, which was up 77% year on year in March, activity remains well below 2022 levels. Martina Hennessy, the CEO of said that mortgage holders who remain loyal to their original lender - often one of the main pillar banks - could be missing out on tens of thousands of euro in savings by not exploring more competitive alternatives. "There has been a lot of change in the mortgage market over the last 18 months, competitiveness has improved with two new lenders entering the market and significant rate cuts," she said. Today's index also highlights a shift in borrower behaviour, with over 20% of new mortgages in 2024 drawn down on variable rates, compared to under 10% in 2022, which the online broker said reflected greater confidence that rates will remain stable or fall further. An average variable rate on the Irish market is 4.15%, but they range from 3.75% up to 5.65% "As a result of this shift, we have seen real product innovation this year with the introduction of a new benchmarked variable product," Ms Hennessy said. "Avant Money's Flex Mortgage product is benchmarked to the 12-month Euribor rate and currently starts from 3.04%, and offers a huge opportunity for mortgage holders who have a preference for a variable rate to switch and save," she noted. She said that Finance Ireland recently announced that they are stopping new mortgage lending, meaning many of its existing customers are now rolling off low fixed rates onto some of the highest rates in the market. "Mortgage holders rolling out of fixed rates with Finance Ireland certainly need to assess market options. With no new mortgage lending proposition in place and servicing transferred to a third party, there is little incentive for rate competitiveness," Ms Hennessy cautioned. She also noted that Bank of Ireland and AIB are focused on the green mortgage space with their most favourable rates offered to those with A energy ratings. But Martina Hennessy said that the majority of homes in Ireland do not meet the BER threshold to avail of lower green rates. She also said that the market has become more competitive for those who are not eligible for a green rate but who have built up equity in their home and they can still secure the lowest market rate, which is currently 3%. Ms Hennessy said that with nearly 700,000 home mortgage in Ireland and large numbers still on uncompetitive rates, the opportunity for mortgage holders to save by switching remains substantial.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
LHV Group results in April 2025
April was a month of excellent results and strong deposit growth for LHV. The consolidated loan portfolio of LHV Group grew by EUR 77 million, and the total amount of deposits increased by EUR 727 million in April. The volume of funds managed by LHV decreased by EUR 4 million over the month. Payments related to financial intermediaries amounted to 6.5 million in April. AS LHV Group earned EUR 10.8 million in net profit in April. By subsidiary, AS LHV Pank earned a net profit of EUR 10.1 million, LHV Bank Ltd EUR 83 thousand, AS LHV Kindlustus EUR 319 thousand and AS LHV Varahaldus EUR 68 thousand. The return on equity attributable to the shareholders of LHV Group was 19.1% and the financial plan remains. The number of customers in LHV Pank increased by 2,800 in April. While the loan portfolio of the bank grew by EUR 53 million, the volume of deposits increased by EUR 574 million – strong growth compensated for the downturn of the previous quarter. EUR 41 million of the increase in deposits came from retail customers and EUR 212 million from corporate customers (partially temporary deposits). In addition, platform deposits were increased by EUR 120 million. The decrease in interest income continued in April due to the decline in Euribor. The level of credit quality was good, and in the coming months there may be an opportunity for a reduction in impairments. In April, Moody's Ratings raised the ratings of LHV Pank's covered bond programme and covered bond ratings to the highest Aaa level. In the annual survey organised by CV-Online, LHV has been recognised as one of the leading employers in the financial sector for the fifth consecutive year. In the overall top-of-mind assessment, LHV ranked second. The business volumes of LHV Bank operating in the United Kingdom continued to grow rapidly. The loan portfolio increased by EUR 24 million and the volume of deposits from the platforms increased by EUR 130 million over the month. Conditions are set for the upcoming direct raising of deposits. In April, the bank's profit was impacted by the larger marketing expense for the soon-to-be-launched campaign for retail banking. In April, the equity capital of LHV Bank was increased by EUR 12 million and subordinated bonds were issued in the same amount. LHV Kindlustus signed new insurance contracts in the amount of EUR 3.7 million in April. Claims paid totalled EUR 2.1 million and 12,800 new claims were registered. The loss ratio of major insurance products remained at good level, ensuring good profitability for LHV Kindlustus. The profitability of LHV Varahaldus met the financial plan. The month was characterised by a tense time on the stock markets, while the pension funds managed by LHV were able to maintain their value. The larger funds, L and XL, declined by 0.4% and 0.3% respectively over the month, but have delivered year-to-date returns of 3.4% and 4.1%. Index funds performed more weakly, with LHV Pensionifond Indeks falling by 4.1% during the month. In April, AS LHV Group issued EUR 50 million worth of Tier 1 capital, which ensures sufficient capitalisation for the company's growth and allowed the repurchase of AT1 bonds issued five years prior. Moody's Investors Service reviewed LHV Group's credit ratings at the end of the month, leaving them unchanged. LHV Group's long-term issuer rating is Baa3 with a positive outlook. To access the reports of AS LHV Group, please visit the website at LHV Group is the largest domestic financial group and capital provider in Estonia. LHV Group's key subsidiaries are LHV Pank, LHV Varahaldus, LHV Kindlustus, and LHV Bank Limited. The Group employs over 1,150 people. As at the end of April, LHV's banking services are being used by 468,000 clients, the pension funds managed by LHV have 113,000 active clients, and LHV Kindlustus protects a total of 176,000 clients. LHV Bank Limited, a subsidiary of the Group, holds a banking licence in the United Kingdom and provides banking services to international financial technology companies, as well as loans to small and medium-sized RumCommunications ManagerPhone: +372 502 0786Email: Attachment LHV Group 2025-04-ENError in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Business Wire
06-05-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Piraeus Financial Holdings: First Quarter 2025 Financial Results
ATHENS, Greece--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Piraeus Financial Holdings (ATHEX: TPEIR) (OTCQX:BPIRY) (OTCQX: BPIRF): Q1.25: Strong start to the year, with loan growth and client AuMs outperforming targets Q1 2025 highlights Robust profits and returns Solid profitability of €284mn, corresponding to €0.22 earnings per share and 14.7% RoaTBV, well on track to meet or exceed the full year targets of c.€0.80 and c.14% respectively; tangible book value per share increased to €6.01, up 14% yoy Net revenues at €649mn, up by 10% yoy, supported by net fee income; fees grew by 10% yoy, benefiting from strong growth of client balances 25% fees over net revenue, up by 2 percentage points qoq NII dropped by 7% yoy, reflecting the reduction of 135bps in 3m Euribor respectively €373mn cash dividend out of 2024 net profits, to be paid to Piraeus shareholders on 10 Jun.25 Discipline in operating efficiency and balance sheet management Disciplined operating efficiency, with 35% cost-to-core-income ratio, among the best across EU banks; operating expenses at €224mn, as budgeted for Q1, burdened by frontloaded tax costs and investments to IT and digital banking Strong balance sheet, with historic low level of cost of risk at 35bps, down from 51bps a year ago. NPE ratio at 2.6% vs. 3.5% a year ago and prudent NPE coverage at 64%, up 4 percentage points yoy. Excluding NPE servicing fees and synthetic securitization costs, underlying cost of risk landed at record low 14bps, down from 17bps in Q1.24 Outstanding loan book and client assets growth Performing loans at €35bn, up 16% yoy with €1.1bn growth in Q1.25, driven by business lending; Piraeus RRF related loans stand at €2.2bn at end-Q1.25 Superior liquidity profile with €61bn deposits (+5% yoy) and liquidity coverage ratio at 201% Client assets under management (AuM) increased by 25% yoy, at €12.5bn, already surpassing the full-year target of >€12.0bn, driven by mutual funds (+39% yoy), as well as institutional mandates and private banking inflows CET1 with comfortable buffers above management target Pro forma CET1 ratio stood at 14.4% and total capital ratio at 19.5%, absorbing the 50% distribution accrual for 2025, c.€90mn DTC amortization, robust loan growth and the Basel IV impact; MREL ratio reached 28.2% in Mar.25
