Winding-up Agencies

A distressed bank can transfer structured securities and other risk bearing positions, for example impaired loans, and complete business segments that are not essential for the bank's future strategy into a winding-up agency, so called bad bank. Thus the distressed bank gets the opportunity to wind up these risk bearing portfolios in an orderly manner and to refocus and realign with a promising business model. Through the transfer of the risky positions the bank gets released from capital requirements as well as from pressure to write downs caused by fluctuations in values. Nevertheless the owners of the bank remain in charge of the winding-up agency financially. The owners of the bank still have to make up for financial losses arising from this agency.

The Federal Agency for Financial Market Stabilisation (FMSA) created two winding-up agencies: The Erste Abwicklungsanstalt (EAA) and the FMS Wertmanagement (FMS-WM). Both are legally extendedly supervised by the FMSA. Thereby the conditions of the duty to offset losses by the FMSA are determined by the charter of each winding-up agency respectively. Upon completion of the liquidation, viz. after the sale of all the transferred risk positions and business segments, the FMSA will dissolve the winding-up agencies.