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Bailout for Hypo Real

Catherine Deshayes

The German government and the country's banks and insurers agreed on a £25 billion rescue package for commercial property lender Hypo Real Estate Holding AG after an earlier bailout faltered...

Germany's financial industry agreed to double a credit line for Hypo Real Estate to 30 billion euros, Torsten Albig, a Spokesman for Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck, said late yesterday in an e-mailed statement. The Federal Government's guarantee for the credit line remains unchanged, Albig said.

The Government and the Bundesbank have said that Hypo Real Estate, Germany's second-biggest property lender, is too big to fail. They met with banks and insurers in Berlin all day yesterday to discuss a revamped rescue package after private banks on Saturday withdrew their support for a 35 billion-euro rescue package brokered a week ago.

'The need for an enlargement of the bailout has increased investors' concern that Hypo Real Estate will have to be wound- down eventually,'' said Konrad Becker, a Munich-based analyst at Merck Finck & Co. who recommends selling the shares.

Under the previous rescue plan, the Bundesbank intended to contribute 20 billion euros to a credit line for Hypo Real Estate, while a group of unidentified financial institutions agreed to provide another 15 billion euros.

The German Government and banks and insurers also planned to provide an additional guarantee for the repayment of the £25 billion loan, of which the government would cover £13 billion euros.

Hypo Real Estate, run by Chief Executive Officer Georg Funke, 53, since it was spun off from HVB Group in 2003, was forced to seek the lifeline after its Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc unit, which lends to governments, failed to get short-term funding amid the credit crunch

Hypo Real Estate said in an e-mailed statement that it welcomes the additional credit line, which 'became necessary as a result of the intensification of the financial crisis in the last week.'

'The solution ensures that Hypo Real Estate is stabilized, will have sufficient access to liquidity even in an ongoing financial crisis, and can continue to operate,'' Funke said in this morning's statement.

Governments from Dublin to Moscow are racing to shore up Europe's faltering financial institutions as the global banking crisis widens. European leaders meeting in Paris this weekend pledged to bail out their own nations' banks, while stopping short of a regional rescue effort.

BNP Paribas SA, France's biggest bank, will take control of Fortis's units in Belgium after a government rescue of the Brussels and Amsterdam-based company failed.

The German Government yesterday said it will fully guarantee personal savings accounts in a bid to ease concerns about the stability of the nation's banking system. Until now, private savings accounts, including the accounts of small, privately held companies, have been guaranteed by 180 banks in Germany. This covers 90 percent of an account's balance to a maximum of 20,000 euros.

Failure to provide the rescue package to Hypo Real Estate 'may have triggered unpredictable consequences for the German financial and economic system similar to those of the collapse of U.S. financial group Lehman Brothers,' the Bundesbank and German financial-services regulator BaFin said in a joint letter dated September 29th and addressed to Finance Minister Steinbrueck.

Source: Bloomberg