Servicers seek ‘ghost’ debtors
Debt management companies are diving into the hard core of the private debt owed to banks and, mainly, funds that have bought the bad loans, and have so far succeeded in streamlining loans amounting to approximately 10.3 billion euros out of the total of €98 billion they undertook to be managed, with an emphasis on those from 2021 onwards.
Based on the latest available data, total overdue debt was limited in the first quarter of 2024 to €69.9 billion, of which €59.4 billion belong to funds and €10.4 billion to banks.
According to the government’s general secretary for the financial sector and private debt, Theoni Alambasi, “overdue private debt to banks and funds in terms of total private debt decreased by 10 percentage points and reached 59.9% in the first quarter of 2024 from 69.9% in 2019, showing the gradual recovery in terms of the orderly servicing of debts.”
Private debt management firms are now looking for some 920,000 “ghosts,” out of a total of 2.3 million debtors, for whom they have no contact information as the details they have received from the banks during loan sales are obsolete. Their total debts amount to €25 billion.
