Santander feels pain of Spanish property hangover
Wednesday, February 1, 2012 @ 11:43 AM
Santander, the euro zone's biggest bank, reported a sharp drop in annual profit after it set aside money against foreclosed Spanish property, anticipating government demands that lenders recognise heavy real estate losses.
Spanish banks have hundreds of billions of euros of unsaleable land and property and unrecoverable loans to bankrupt developers sitting on their balance sheets, four years after a housing and construction crash.
Santander's grim outlook for the property sector on Tuesday comes a day after data showed Spain's economy looked set to slip into recession after contracting for the first time in two years in the last quarter of 2011.
Read more at Reuters.com