The Management Board is proud of the achievements of the employees of the Investitions- und Landesbank Brandenburg ILB in the corona year. This became clear on Thursday at the presentation of the ILB annual report 2020 in Potsdam. CEO Tillmann Stenger pointed out that a third of the employees had been busy processing the Corona aid for months, for which there is now the sixth program. The solution to this additional task also explains the higher personnel costs of the state-owned bank.
Around 64,000 companies and self-employed people were supported with 579 million euros through these programs, according to Stenger. However, the temporary backlog in the processing of the other programs was almost completely made up for in the second half of the year. “Solidity and speed” should have been brought under one roof. By and large, it succeeded.
With the upcoming entrepreneurship aid program 3, the bank will again receive requests for support in five-digit numbers, the chief executive of the development bank estimated. Compared to the previous Corona programs, it shows significant improvements. For Stenger, however, the policy of lavish money distribution is slowly coming to an end. “That must have been the last big sip from the bottle, it can’t go on like this, the public finances are reaching their limits,” he said. With the Covid-19 vaccination program, the Brandenburg economy will hopefully “get back into calmer waters”.
ILB is currently taking care of the legally compliant payment of November and December aid. The responsible board member Kerstin Jöntgen affirmed that the numerous complaints about delays are taken very seriously and that everything is done to deal with them as quickly as possible.
With around 100 funding programs, the bank’s normal business continued in 2020, explained CEO Stenger. 1.7 billion euros in funding have been pledged for almost 5600 projects. They flowed into the promotion of innovation and technology, into corporate investments, the business-oriented infrastructure and into the construction of price-controlled rental apartments. Despite Corona, there was a “surprisingly strong start-up activity” last year. 165 founders were supported with a total of 11.4 million euros. “Another 11.4 million were added in equity capital.” In 2021, ILB expects a commitment volume of 1.1 billion euros. Board member Jöntgen: “As ILB, we are ready to continue helping the Brandenburg economy through this difficult time.”
When asked what influence the financial policy of the EU, federal and state governments will have on the stability of the euro in times of corona, Stenger said he was still assuming a low interest rate policy of the European Central Bank (ECB). This allows the highly indebted countries to meet their loan and interest obligations in the future. Any new debt that Germany is entering into in the corona pandemic “can be represented”.
According to Stenger, the legal obligation, which is now apparently suspended for companies until the end of April, to immediately report an impending bankruptcy, cannot be continued “forever”. Of course, that would first reduce the bankruptcy numbers, which were astonishingly low in 2020. On the other hand, there are knock-on effects in business life. Business partners of “weakly positioned” firms became increasingly insecure. “You can’t do something like that in the long run,” warned Stenger. For him, Easter is an important time in this regard, especially for the catering and event industry, in order to be able to “avert the impending bankruptcies in this area in particular”. Much depends on the fact that after the winter break it is possible to start again from this point in time. “The reserves will be used up by then.”
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