Millennium BCP’s recorded losses for 2014 were a depressing €217.9 million, an average of almost €600,000 per day.
This brings the total audited loss for the last two years to €958.4 million.
Nuno Amado who heads the bank said that operating results were more than doubled to €1.14 billion, driven by net interest income up 31.6% and reduced operating costs, down 11.2%.
However, losses from bad debts were heavy as the bank struggles with a mountain of old debts that it has been forced to write off over the year.
In the presentation of results this afternoon in Lisbon, Amado highlighted the good underlying performance of the main income streams, but admitted that the losses were at a high level.
In 2013 the bank wrote off a whopping €820.8 million and last year this rose to €1,107 million.
Nuno Amado said that in the fourth quarter of 2014, the bank had to account for its losses on the PT shares it held, part of overall stock market losses of €53.8 million which it put down as extraordinary items in the accounts.
The PT losses represented more than 90% of this writedown, €49 million, as PT shares slumped to their lowest ever price of well below one euro a share.
Amado said that the whole situation surrounding PT should be subject to a review, but the losses are real an unlikely in the extreme to be recouped.
The banks performance looks even poorer when viewed against the number of insolvencies in Portugal which declined by 33% in 2014 over the previous year.
According to an annual analysis released today the construction sector continued to record the highest number of insolvencies, accounting for 27% of cases but overall the news was of positive upward trends.
