Austria Raises Spat With Bavaria on Who Pays Hypo Billions
Boris GroendahlDec 13, 2012 1:26 pm ET
(Updates with decision in second paragraph, Bayern LB comment in fifth.)
Dec. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Austria is stepping up a legal battle with Bavaria over who will foot the bill for billions of euros of losses at Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank International AG, three years after the two made a deal to avert its collapse.
Hypo Alpe will halt repayment of 2.35 billion euros ($3 billion) that Bayerische Landesbank, owned by the Bavarian state, lent it before the sale, it said in a statement today. It has demanded back as much as 2.3 billion euros it already redeemed. That will trigger a demand for immediate repayment if Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Soeder makes good on a warning made earlier this year.
“Repayments on the relevant funds have to be suspended until a sustainable restructuring of Hypo Alpe has been achieved,” the Austrian bank said in the statement. “Payments already made on the majority of received funds have to be reclaimed.”
Austria, which supported Hypo Alpe’s decision in a shareholder meeting today, also has until today to sue BayernLB over the rescue deal in which it bought Hypo Alpe for one euro in the early hours of Dec. 14, 2009.
BayernLB said in an e-mail statement today that it rejected the move and that the refinancing extended to Hypo Alpe “isn’t a capital substitute.” The bank added that it is suing Hypo Alpe in Munich, that there was no justification for the decision, and that Hypo Alpe is “capable of fulfilling its obligations.”
Bank Failures
Hypo Alpe and BayernLB are among Europe’s most expensive bank failures, piling up as much as 14 billion euros in bailout costs for taxpayers in Austria and Bavaria. Executives and politicians behind the banks’ demise are either retired, dismissed or dead, leaving Hypo Alpe with soured loans in the former Yugoslavia and BayernLB with Icelandic debt and non- performing asset-backed securities.
“I’m having a little bit of a deja vu experience,” Rolf Holub, who led a parliamentary investigation of the bank in its home province, southern Austrian Carinthia, said in an interview yesterday. “Each time Hypo Alpe gets a new owner, the new owner says after a while that he couldn’t possibly have known the bank was in such bad shape.”
Austria’s statute of limitations means the government has until today to sue BayernLB to unwind the Hypo Alpe rescue. Daniela Kinz, spokeswoman for Austria’s Finance Ministry, declined to comment on whether the government would proceed with the lawsuit.
Austria set aside another 1.5 billion euros of taxpayer funds this year to prop up Hypo Alpe, with the 500 million-euro cash part of that amount injected today. BayernLB, meanwhile, has started to pay down the Bavarian state aid it received.
‘Substituting Equity’
Hypo Alpe is arguing that BayernLB awarded loans to keep the bank afloat even when it expected it would default. Under Austria’s insolvency laws, similar to U.S. and German rules, the lending may qualify as “substituting equity” and become subordinated to other liabilities. Hypo Alpe said this requires it to stop paying interest or principal on the borrowing and demand return of redemptions and interest payments already made.
Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Soeder, after a hastily arranged meeting in October with Maria Fekter, his opposite number in Vienna, said BayernLB would call in the loans immediately should Hypo Alpe halt payment.
Most of the borrowing matures at the end of 2013 or in 2014, according to Hypo Alpe.
Rapid Expansion
Hypo Alpe expanded rapidly in the 2000s, when it was owned by Austria’s Carinthia province, which was led by the late populist politician Joerg Haider. It became one of the biggest banks in the former Yugoslavia, with its assets almost quadrupling to 43.3 billion euros in the five years to 2008. The growth was fueled by as much as 25 billion euros in wholesale funding guaranteed by Carinthia, which has a 2 billion-euro budget.
BayernLB bought its initial 50 percent stake in Hypo Alpe for 1.63 billion euros in 2007 from Carinthia, insurer Grazer Wechselseitige and a group of investors led by Tilo Berlin, Hypo Alpe’s former chief executive officer. After Hypo’s rescue, its losses added up to 3.7 billion euros.
Austrian taxpayers have subsidized Hypo Alpe with 1.76 billion euros in capital and a 200 million-euro asset guarantee. Carinthia’s guarantees and those of the federal government still total 16.7 billion euros. The bank sold another 1 billion euros of subordinated debt backed by Austria this month.
Several courts in Germany and Austria are already dealing with cases related to the bank’s failure. BayernLB is suing one of Hypo Alpe’s former owners in Austria, saying it was tricked into the 2007 purchase of the lender. The company also accused former CEO Werner Schmidt and seven other executives as well as Kurt Faltlhauser, a former Bavarian finance minister, of ignoring warnings about the viability of the purchase.
Former Hypo Alpe CEOs Wolfgang Kulterer and Berlin as well as other executives have been charged in several separate cases by Austrian authorities. They all denied wrongdoing. Haider died in a 2008 car crash.
--With assistance from Oliver Suess in Munich. Editors: James Kraus, Jim Silver