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Albanian banks write off nearly 316 mln USD in two years

Xinhua, April 23, 2017 Adjust font size:

Second-tier banks operating in Albania have written-off from their balance sheets around 40 billion lek (316 million U.S. dollars) in nonperforming loans in the last two years, data published by the Bank of Albania showed Sunday.

The process of cleaning the banks balance sheets from lost loans over the past three years continued also in 2016, during which banks wrote-off around 12.6 billion Lek, Central Bank data showed.

According to bank experts, such move has contributed to the improvement of the credit quality and further reduction of the nonperforming loans ratio.

The drop reflects the combined effects of the improvement of the economic situation, credit restructuring and nonperforming loans write-off from balance sheets, according to them.

However, despite the process of cleaning the Albanian banking systems balance sheets, the overall nonperforming loans ratio remains still high at around 18 percent.

But considering that the level of NPLs stood at 20.4 in November 2016, experts see the drop to 18 percent in February 2017 as significant. Endit