The bank has ‘suspended’ 20,000 million in mortgages due to the Government’s moratorium – idealista / news

The Bank of Spain has updated the numbers on the evolution of the moratoriums on loans that were launched in the midst of the coronavirus crisis.

According to data from the financial supervisor, At the end of July, there were 221,053 loans with mortgage guarantee benefiting from the moratorium applied by the Government, of the 267,763 applications submitted to date, whose combined balance is close to 20,000 million euros. This means that the banking sector has given the green light so far to 82.5% of applications received.

These figures include the temporary suspensions that wage earners and self-employed workers have benefited from, and both for homes and other buildings such as premises, small offices or warehouses linked to the economic activity of self-employed workers. And, although the current figure far exceeds the 65,559 approvals recorded at the end of April, it hardly reflects an increase of 12,355 new moratoriums in the last two months (208,698 approvals had been registered at the end of May). All of them are part of the measures approved by the Government in the first weeks of confinement to try to alleviate the economic impact of Covid-19 and the effects on mobility and activity restrictions.

However, there are many more mortgages benefiting from moratoriums, after the financial sector launched a private initiative. Notaries already calculated that there would be at least half a million loans with a mortgage guarantee that could benefit from the stoppage proposed by the banks and that is what the figures of the body led by Pablo Hernández de Cos show: Until July 31, almost 595,000 sectoral moratoriums have been registered, with a balance of more than 22,250 million euros.

Therefore, the moratoriums that the bank has applied on its own are more than twice those that have been carried out following the Executive’s guidelines.

And the main factor behind these differences is that the finance initiative establishes requirements that are lower than those set by the government. While the legislative alternative is aimed at the most vulnerable groups and has very demanding requirements, the bank-motivated moratorium only requires as requirements having entered an ERTE, having lost a job, or having suffered a significant loss of income or a termination of employment. activity in the case of the self-employed, “the sectoral agreement is applicable to people who, despite having suffered a reduction in income and ability to pay due to covid-19, do not meet the requirements to benefit from public moratoriums”, as explained by the bank employer. Of course, the formalization of the mortgage must be prior to March 14, 2020.

On the other hand, the Bank of Spain explains that, at the end of the seventh month of the year, requests for Legislative moratorium on credit contracts without mortgage guarantee They amounted to 438,496, with 374,962 being issued, with a pending balance of the suspended loans of 2,790 million euros. Within this case are, for example, consumer loans.

Employees, main beneficiaries

The data from the financial supervisor also show that the main beneficiaries (including both debtors and guarantors) of the three types of moratoriums are being wage earners, who account for more than 70% of total suspensions. In the case of the self-employed, the protagonists are those linked to the branches of activity of commerce, hospitality and other services, followed at a certain distance by professional, scientific and technical activities, transport and construction. Together, these sectors of activity represent more than 75% of the total moratoriums for self-employed workers that have been implemented to date.

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