Nicosia: Bank of Cyprus, the Mediterranean island’s largest lender, announced yesterday losses of more than ¤1/2bn for the six months to June as it increased buffers for bad debt.
Cyprus is recovering from a financial crisis that left a number of its top banks insolvent and forced it to negotiate a painful bailout with international creditors in 2013.
Bank of Cyprus said it had set aside another ¤500m for bad loans in the first half of 2017.
That left the lender saddled with losses after tax of ¤554m ($667m) for the six-month period, compared with a ¤56m profit in the first half of 2016.
Chief executive John Patrick Hourican said the bank was focused on reducing risk in its balance sheet.
“We expect to continue to utilise the operating profit of the Bank in the remainder of 2017 for further balance sheet de-risking,” he said.
On an upbeat note, the bank noted that Cyprus’s 3.5 percent economic growth rate in the second quarter of the year was the second fastest in Europe.
It said the group had more than doubled its new lending in the six months to June from a year earlier, to ¤1.1bn.
