Q1 to decide the course of frozen loans
“We will do whatever it takes” for loans in moratorium status not to drop into the irrecoverable category, Intrum Hellas chief executive Giorgos Georgakopoulos has told Kathimerini.
The executive board member of one of the biggest bad-loan managers in Europe used the famous phrase of former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi to reflect the concern debt management companies are expressing that loans worth 26 billion euros currently in suspension due to the pandemic do not definitively join the stock of bad loans.
These worries mostly concern the loans that were being properly serviced until April 2020, when the moratorium was put in place. As doValue Chief Executive and President of the Association of Loan and Credit Obligation Management Companies Tasos Panousis says, “the first quarter of 2021 will be a decisive period for the absorption of shocks so that we are not led to a new generation of bad loans.”
Both banks and servicers say they are determined to ease debt repayments for borrowers hurt by the crisis, while after the second lockdown the prospect for fresh moratoriums is on the table of talks with the European regulators.
