LM Legal Services Blog

The number of the personal and business bad debt has been steadily increasing for a second consecutive month according to the statistics of the Bulgarian National Bank. In the end of February 2009 the bad and restructured debt has reached 1.65 billion levs which is an increase of 314 million lev only in a month. This is 3,4% of all loans. In comparison last year this ratio was slightly above 2%. According to analysts this level is still not worrying as the overall condition of the Bulgarian bank system is rather stable. Companies which collect bad debt claim that their work has increased by 40% in the first two months of 2009. The level of the repayment of loans received by Bulgarian banks have decreased by 20%. The level of partial repayments has increased, while the level of total repayments have decreased. Job losses and the increase of the part-time employment are key factors for this.

In February 2009 the number of the delayed repayment has increased by 19% in comparison with January 2009 and for January 2009 the increase was 13% in comparison with December 2008.

Although banks’ interest rates of savings accounts are still high, in February those of one- and three-month deposits started decreasing. At the same time the interest rates for six- and twelve-month fix term saving deposits are still increasing.

UniCredit Bulbank did not continue with their promotions and decreased the interest rate of the fourth period of their Increasing Interest scheme from 12% to 9% for the deposits in levs and from 10% to 7% for the deposits in Euros. The interest for their one year fix term deposit has dropped from 8.80% to 4.85%.

First Investment Bank did not continue their promotion Golden Deposit. The bank has launched their product March Deposit, a three month fix term deposit with interest rate, both for deposits in Euros and in levs, of 8.75% instead of 9.75% like the previous promotion.

Most other banks still keep increasing the interests of savings accounts in order to attract fresh money. Among them are: PostBank, Raiffeisenbank, Eibank, Invest Bank and Alpha Bank.

Concerning customer loans, all banks have increased their interest rates by about 1% in February, apart from Alpha Bank who decreased it by 0.7%.

Most of the mortgage rates have not increased and in the rare cases of an increase, it does not exceed 1%.

Representatives of the Bulgarian Chamber of Construction have had a fruitless meeting with managers from the leading Bulgarian banks. The developers have informed the bankers that construction projects exceeding 2 billion levs have been stopped. According to information of the chamber in 2008 the number of the new planning permissions have decreased by 20%.  The situation of the projects which have been already started but their developers do not have money to complete them is most alarming.  Although there are many shopping malls and business centres among the projects put on hold, there are also apartment buildings where most or all apartments have been sold off-plan to buyers who took mortgages. The owners of such kind of properties are in dire straights as they can not use them -  the buildings where the properties are situatied can not acquire permission to use (Protocol 16) in the foreseable future.  Deadlines have been missed.

The response of the bank managers was that now banks can only rely on the personal savings and on the budget and ignored warnings that they might also suffer from the recession and told the developers to manage on their own.

Due to the recession the banks have now offered higher interest rates for savings accounts which range from 6% to 10%. The most popular are fifteen day, one month and three month savings accounts because there is no loss of the interests.

With the increase of the savings accounts’ interests, the loan interest has also increased by 2% on average. Concerning  mortgages, in the last months there has not been any increase due to the fact that customers are unwilling to take new mortgages. The interest rates remain 8% for the mortgages in Euros and 9,5% for the mortgages in levs.

The loan interests in Bulgaria have risen to the levels of 2005. In December 2008 half of the banks in the country have increased their interest and some of them have also increased the fees for servicing a loan.

It is unlikely that loan interests will fall in the first six months of 2009. Some bankers expect this to happen at the end of the year. This means that the prices of credits will not decrease. It is expected that the level of bad debt will increase.