It is not the job of the European Central Bank (ECB) to stop large cross-border bank mergers in Europe, the head of banking supervision Claudia Buch said, quoted by Reuters.
Her words come at a time when the German “Commerzbank” is trying to fend off the attempts of the Italian “UniCredit” to acquire it, the agency indicates.
“The supervisor’s job is not to stand in the way of cross-border banking integration,” Buch told a conference in Riga. “Everything we can do within our powers to ensure that cross-border activity is not impeded and we are certainly doing that,” she added, without naming any banks.
UniCredit began talks to acquire Commerzbank last week after significantly increasing its stake in the German bank, drawing criticism both from the bank itself and among German politicians who would like to preserve the independence of the German creditor.
Speaking alongside Buch, the governor of the Central Bank of Latvia and member of the ECB’s board of directors, Martins Kazaks, criticized “the tendency to make decisions only from a national perspective” and wanted Europe to get bigger banks that could compete on a global level. “It’s good to have ‘national champions’, but if your ‘champion’ is dwarfed on the world stage, it wouldn’t matter in terms of global competitiveness,” he said.
