According to the latest available data, the percentage of loans that were not being serviced in Greece reached 27.8 per cent in March, amounting to 64 billion euros, from a total of 228 billion euros owed to all Greek banks in business, mortgage and consumer loans over the same period.
Some 80,000 applications have flooded Greece’s justice of the peace courts in the past six months from individuals seeking to ease the terms of their bank loans, with court officials saying that they are assigning hearing dates all the way up to 2025 to deal with the workload.
The number of people trying to restructure their debts as they struggle with the crisis has doubled in comparison to the start of 2013 and is growing proportionally to rising unemployment rates, even though the country’s banks have already reached restructuring agreements with over 800,000 debt holders.
The justice of the peace courts, meanwhile, have already heard 7,600 applications, rejecting 35 per cent of the cases and sending the other 65 per cent to trial.
According to the data compiled for the last evaluation of the Greek economy, banks have restructured some 6 per cent of their total loan portfolios. This represents 13 billion euros’ worth of debts, 45 per cent of which is in the form of business loans, while at the same time write-offs account for 4 billion euros, sending the total amount owed in problematic loans close to 100 billion euros.
Bank data shows that by the end of 2012, of the total 1.1 million mortgage loans issued by Greek banks, some 300,000 presented problems in their servicing, while those that are paid regularly dropped from 960,000 in 2011 to 850,000 the following year.
In the consumer credit market, meanwhile, one in 2.5 consumer loans are on shaky ground, and the number of those that are serviced regularly dropped from 2 million at the end of 2011 to 1.7 million at the end of the following year. Likewise, one in five credit cards has two months of overdue payments, while those that have not been paid for three months rose from 465,000 to 610,000 from late 2011 to late 2012.
An examination of the applications submitted by troubled borrowers reveals that one in three has absolutely no assets whatsoever and just two in three have assets, including those with mortgages.
Source: ekathimerini