At a speech in Hamburg in March 2013, Andres Dombret, executive board member at Germany's central bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, identified the €100bn-worth of shipping loans on German bank balance sheets as a substantial regional and sectoral risk in the country's banking system. Bankers are now reporting that their shipping loan portfolios are under a high level of scrutiny from both the Bundesbank and German markets regulator BaFin, which co-operate closely on bank supervision, and that there has been pressure behind the scenes for some banks to increase provisions.
"KPMG has been carrying out audits with a focus on shipping portfolios, and BaFin has received the data formatted in such a way that it can compare one bank's exposure with another, using various parameters," says Christian van Beek, director of financial institutions at Fitch Ratings in Frankfurt.