Helaba's annual press conference this year was somewhat reminiscent of the mystical wizarding world of Harry Potter. When people talk about the villain, they don't mention him by name. Lord Voldemort is He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Helaba is performing the same hocus-pocus these days when it comes to its involvement in the crashed Signa empire of former department store giant René Benko. Just don't mention his name!

It has long been known that the bank financed various companies owned by the Austrian and also helped him to issue a promissory bill. „We have certainly noticed the strong interest in a certain real estate company and its projects in recent weeks and months. We are still unable to comment on this,“ repeated Helaba CEO Thomas Groß. And so the sharp rise in risk provisioning remains „largely driven by a customer relationship in the real estate sector“.

Benko is a major source of pain for Helaba in commercial real estate financing. However, he is not the only one, as the individual risk of Benko is compounded by the generally difficult market situation, which Helaba cannot escape. All in all, this led to a comparatively high ratio of non-performing loans in 2023. At the overall portfolio level, it is still within reasonable limits at 2%, but in commercial real estate finance it jumped from 1.6 to 7% in 2023 compared to the previous year. It is difficult to say exactly how much of this is attributable to Benko – after all, the bank is not talking about him.

Because the bank is broadly positioned in the Commercial Real Estate segment and elsewhere, it can cope well with this year's pre-tax loss in the real estate segment of 241 million euros. This was compensated for by the Corporates & Markets (409 million euros) and Retail & Asset Management (368 million euros) segments, so that Helaba's bottom line of 722 million euros is still the highest pre-tax profit in the bank's history, despite the Benko spectre.

The sharp rise in non-performing loans also has a curious side effect. In a market environment characterized by rising risks, Helaba was able to reduce its risk-weighted assets (RWA) by 6% to 60.9 billion last year. On the one hand, the Bank placed risks on the capital market with the help of securitizations. However, real estate RWA also fell because defaulted loans no longer represent a risk. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is simply omnipresent these days.