Bank collateral fell in price before the eyes of the Central Bank

The Central Bank knew that banks often distort the value of non-core assets, but the first results of the audit justified the worst expectations. As the Central Bank's audit showed, the value of collateral can be inflated multiple times. In such conditions, the Central Bank is ready to independently identify unscrupulous appraisers, and to pay increased attention to banks using their services. It is unlikely that such a measure will quickly correct the situation, experts say.

Photo: Evgeny Gurko, Kommersant / buy photo

Yesterday, First Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank Alexey Simanovsky published the first estimates of the scale of distortion of the real value of non-core assets of banks (both pledged for loans and those already transferred to their balance sheet for outstanding loans). According to him, in the cases identified by the regulator, the overvaluation was not measured in tens or even hundreds of percent. The distortion is significant, Mr. Simanovsky clarified. And not 2-3 times, but 5-6-7 times or more, he noted. Previously, the Central Bank did not disclose the scale of banks’ revaluation of the quality of their non-core assets. However, this is what the picture looks like for individual players verified by the Central Bank. How much this characterizes the scale of the problem in the system as a whole is still a question. The regulator has just begun work on re-checking the fair value of non-core assets on banks’ balance sheets, announced at the beginning of the year, explained Alexey Simanovsky.

For the first time, the Central Bank’s intentions to involve professional appraisers in the supervision of banks were announced in February of this year by Alexey Plyakin, at that time the head of the banking supervision department of the Central Bank (see Kommersant on February 18).

So far, according to Alexey Simanovsky, the Central Bank has hired two professional appraisers who analyze the most egregious cases. In such a situation, it would be wrong to extend the scale of the disaster entirely to the entire banking system, representatives of the regulator point out.

However, their concern about the issue is obvious - yesterday it was raised twice by different representatives of the supervisory block of the Central Bank. After Mr. Simanovsky, this issue was also raised in her speech by the Deputy Director of the Banking Supervision Department of the Central Bank, Olga Podstrekha. She clarified, the Prime agency reports her words, that in the course of this work, “the Central Bank will accumulate information about unscrupulous appraisers, so that in the future, doubting their reputation, it will not trust their assessments, but will conduct its own assessment of the relevant assets.” Thus, in the future, banks that use the services of appraisers who have been approved by the Central Bank will experience increased attention from the regulator.

Considering that as of October 1, the value of real estate (namely, it makes up the bulk of non-core assets of banks) pledged by banks amounted to 24.6 trillion rubles, two appraisers currently working on the staff of the Central Bank cannot cope with a task of this scale. Therefore, in order to determine the real value of the property, the possibilities of using the services of independent appraisers with a known good reputation are assessed, Ms. Podstrekha clarified.

In general, the measures proposed by the Central Bank will help clear the market of unscrupulous players, experts say. “If there is increased attention to banks that use the services of appraisers whom the Central Bank does not trust, they will inevitably try to refuse to interact with such companies,” says Dmitry Krupyshev, partner at the law firm Legal Capital Partners.

However, accumulating information about unscrupulous appraisers is unlikely to help quickly eliminate the problem of overestimating the value of non-core assets, the appraisers themselves note. “If a company is targeted, then it will be easy for the most persistent unscrupulous players to liquidate it and register a new one,” notes Olga Kochetova, head of the valuation department at Knight Frank. In addition, accumulating information about all unscrupulous market participants, or at least the majority of them, will take more than one year, she adds. “At the same time, a tool for effectively combating this problem already exists in other countries - for example, in Germany there is a special organization that certifies appraisers to evaluate collateral in banks,” explains Ms. Kochetova, adding that in Russia such appraisers can be hired would account for no more than 20% of all market participants. But bankers are confident that sooner or later the Central Bank will be able to filter the market of appraisers in this way. “It doesn’t matter how long it takes to move from point A to point B, the main thing is how systematic the approach will be, and identifying unscrupulous players will certainly work as a filter,” says Kirill Zhukov-Emelyanov, member of the board of Unicredit Bank.

Svetlana Dementieva, Olga Shestopal, Dmitry Ladygin

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