Is UK money safe with Santander?

The above is a question that has been debated on this blog from time to time for several years. Here is a report on the topic from IB Times dated today. The following is a brief quote from that article:

Santander's total customer deposits €632.5bn (£510.3bn) across the world, and in the UK alone it has 26.7m customers for its banking services, including current accounts, mortgages, and consumer credit cards, according to the bank's 2011 annual report. 

It manages £233bn of customer funds in the UK. 

Financial troubles in Santander's home country of Spain led to its creditworthiness being downgraded, as crippling government austerity is enforced in a desperate bid to keep down borrowing costs while cash-strapped banks are begging for recapitalisation.

At the end of the day it will come down to how much one trusts the UK Government as to how you answer the question in this posting's headline. There is a guarantee scheme with a limit that should be sufficient for most ordinary consumers. But having access to your cash without reliance on government intervention or bureaucratic procedures must surely be the main priority for most of us - but which High Street Bank now offers that?

How much do Spain's banks need... Santander chief is vague!

Reuters, linked here, has an update on the growing disaster in Spain.

Amazingly it includes the following rather astounding quote:

Prominent Spanish Banker Emilio Botin, Chairman of Santander, the euro zone's biggest bank, said on Monday he expected the figure to be 40 billion euros, though it was not clear whether he was referring to all banks in the system.

Link to Wikipedia added by this blogger!

Bankia shares suspended - Spain's Sorrows set to trump Greece Grief!

The report on Bankia may be read from fellow Euro Zone member Ireland's Irish Times from here, more surprisingly also from the Daily Mail, linked here, who just recently have begun to twig the dangers to their readers from Santander Bank in Britain!

Update 1538 BST
On Spain see also this Telegraph report that Catalonia is asking for a €17 billion bailout from the Spanish government, no doubt the first of many such requests soon to follow.

Santander downgrade another exposure for Britain to the Euro

The reports coming in on the downgrade by S and P by two notches of the huge Spanish bank Santander, must surely be of great concern to HM Treasury!

According to some such reports our sloppy politicians, civil servants, Bank of England officials and other financial regulators have permitted some 26.7 million British comsumers to run accounts with this bank, most of which acquisitions were made even when it was increasingly obvious that the Spanish economy and indeed the sovereign itself was in deep, deep trouble.

Now of course these accounts might still be quite secure and the assets they represent perfectly intact and available to Britiain's guarantors against any further difficulties or even possible eventual default. On the other hand seeing how everything else connected with banks, governments and the EU has gone over recent years, then perhaps things might not end up quite so clear cut!

Keeping Europeans Calm or perhaps just Ignorant!

One of the most suspicious events of the past few years of economic crisis has for me become evident in watching the activities and results of the Spanish bank Santander. Yesterday saw the results of that operation published, in the USA early yesterday and this morning in Europe. There are lots of bits missing in the version that seems to be most available from Euope. Compare Reuters US edition from here and the AP Bloomberg Businessweek version from Madrid linked here.

On their property portfolio the following is the main highlights provided for Europe:

Banco Santander said Thursday its first-quarter profits fell 24 percent as its provisions for bad loans rose sharply, particularly in its recession-hit home market of Spain. The eurozone's largest bank by market capitalization said its net profit in the January-March period was (EURO)1.6 billion ($2.1 billion). Revenue grew by more than 8 percent to (EURO)11.4 billion.
That income gain, however, was offset by bigger loan losses -- Santander set aside (EURO)3.1 billion in provisions, up 51 percent from the same quarter of 2011.
Banco Santander S.A. said non-performing loans amounted to 3.9 percent of its portfolio, an increase of 0.37 percentage points. In rececession-plagued Spain, the ratio rose 1.18 points to 5.75 percent.

In the USA report things appear far more gruesome and one suspects a fairer view of the absolute disaster ongoing in the Spanish property market can thus be obtained:

Santander (SAN.MC), the euro zone's largest bank, said on Thursday it still had 1 billion euros in property-related losses to come after first quarter profit was hit by rising loan provisions in recessionary Spain and overheated Brazil. Spain has instructed its banks to set aside capital to cover a funding gap of tens of billions of euros stemming from a decade of unsustainable lending to property developers during a real estate boom that went abruptly into reverse in 2008. Santander said it would take the rest of the provisions throughout 2012. With more Spanish householders and businesses defaulting on debt as the economy sinks back into recession, and nearly one in four workers unemployed, investors fear the scale of Spain's problem might ultimately require an international bailout as in Greece, Ireland and Portugal....

S and P (based in the USA) knocked Spain's credit rating down two further notches this morning! Irish Times report from here.

Iberian Peninsular prepares for Troika and more downgrades.

Portugal will suffer the further torment of a Troika visit this week yet it is Spanish Banks this evening, fifteen of them from S&P, who receive the latest credit downgrade while Fitch seems to have concentrated on Santander! Read here and here.

The crazed folly of the EU project continues towards the abyss, with ever less hope nor prosperity for Europe's largely de-democratised citizens!

Santander struggles.

It was 11th October 2008 that I first appear to have posted on the worrying condition of Santander, though I believe if I trawled my archives more thoroughly I would find earlier posts than these.

Today the truth began to seep out on this Spanish Bank, read here, the amazing thing is how long it has taken for the obvious to be declared.

Santander - Spaniards shake off the Armada's memory.

The Times reports here, that in future the historic names of Abbey, Alliance & Leicester (A&L) and Bradford & Bingley are to be scrapped to be replaced by that of the Spanish bank that now controls them - Santander - through the incompetence and treachery of our own politicians and some unusual quirks in Spanish tax legislation. In earlier times such an obviously directly Spanish name might have been seen as a distinct marketing disadvantage within the communities these ancient mutual Building Societies once (and perhaps will one day again) SERVE. El Clegg, who clearly owes allegiance to none but himself, see his Wikipedia entry from here, believes "Britain [is] a place of tolerance and pluralism" is the one man in Britain outside of the Governing Labour Party who could have ensured that Britain received the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty which all his party's candidates promised at the last General Election. He engaged in the most extraordinarily devious convolutions to avoid so doing. A politician who chooses to christen his children Antonio, Alberto and Miguel and raise them in the Catholic faith of his Spanish wife, will presumably be one person in England to enjoy some quiet satisfaction at the sight of the Santander name appearing in towns across England on old establishments which once stood for probity!