The European Central Financial institution is just too lax in supervising the eurozone’s largest lenders, the EU’s exterior auditor has mentioned, because it known as for better assurances that “credit score danger is correctly managed and coated”.

The auditor hit out on the ECB for being insufficiently aggressive in pushing eurozone banks to scale back excessive ranges of non-performing loans.

Friday’s detailed critique by the European Courtroom of Auditors additionally accused the ECB of being too sluggish to resolve capital necessities and missing enough workers.

Banks on either side of the Atlantic have come beneath elevated scrutiny in current weeks after the failure of a number of US lenders and the compelled rescue of Credit score Suisse.

The European auditor, which centered on the supervision of 10 lenders with excessive ranges of dangerous debt, mentioned ECB officers had been too hesitant to make use of their full powers and utilized them inconsistently.

“These with the next share of non-performing loans got extra time than the others, and banks may select a protection strategy that was most advantageous to them,” the report said.

An ECB official mentioned the auditors “didn’t perceive that the disposal of NPLs consumes capital, because the banks have to simply accept a value beneath e-book worth.

“Therefore if we raised an excessive amount of the capital necessities they’d have made much less disposals to not breach the necessities, and NPL volumes would have been slower to drop. The calibration on the backside of the vary was primarily based and conditional on the banks’ plans to scale back NPLs.”

It maintained that it had finally achieved its goal, as poisonous money owed had fallen steadily from greater than €1tn eight years in the past to beneath €350bn final 12 months, equal to lower than 2 per cent of complete loans.

In response to the auditor’s criticisms, the ECB mentioned it might set banks’ capital necessities extra speedily — a course of the watchdog discovered took 13 months from the top of the related reporting interval.

It additionally dedicated to deal with staffing shortfalls that left it unable to hold out 1 / 4 of its prioritised investigations of banks’ inside danger fashions and 10 per cent of on-site inspections.

Nonetheless, the central financial institution rejected a number of the suggestions and mentioned others had already been addressed since a workforce of exterior auditors examined the central financial institution’s supervision of lenders in 2021.

Its methodology for setting financial institution capital necessities “ensures that each one materials dangers to which an establishment is uncovered are appropriately coated”, it mentioned.

The ECB was given accountability for overseeing a very powerful eurozone lenders after a banking meltdown and sovereign debt disaster that ripped by way of the area greater than a decade in the past. This led to the creation of its Single Supervisory Mechanism in 2014 as a separate unit from the central financial institution’s financial coverage operations.

“Our total conclusion is that the ECB [has] stepped up its efforts in supervising banks’ credit score danger, and specifically non-performing loans,” the European Courtroom of Auditors mentioned in its 121-page report. “Nonetheless, extra must be accomplished for the ECB to realize elevated assurance that credit score danger is correctly managed and coated.”

The auditors issued three most important suggestions for the ECB: to streamline its supervisory course of, strengthen its danger evaluation of banks and use more practical measures to make banks handle dangers higher.

The central financial institution accepted the primary suggestion, saying it was “contemplating methods to scale back” the time it takes to set financial institution capital necessities. However it solely partly accepted the opposite two suggestions, rejecting a name for it to carry a hiring freeze imposed throughout all of the ECB’s present actions this 12 months.

The ECB mentioned some workers had been added rather than exterior consultants.

It will evaluation subsequent 12 months if “extra formal escalation processes” had been wanted to push nationwide central banks to offer extra workers to joint groups. It mentioned there was nonetheless a 4 per cent workers shortfall on the supervisor, which employs about 1,600 workers.

Some considerations had already been addressed, after a evaluation final 12 months of its methodology for assessing credit score danger and the addition of an “impartial supervisory danger operate” that acts as a second line of defence on setting banks’ capital necessities.