Offloading of Spanish debt sees ING group suffer

The impact of the euro crisis and the deterioration of Spain's economy has seen the Dutch banking group ING reduce its exposure to Spanish sovereign debt by 11.5 percent. The sale of these bonds meant losses of 156 million euros in the second quarter of this year for the bank, and another 78 million euros in July.

The offloading of Spanish debt has had an adverse effect on the group's results, with earnings down by 22 percent in the second quarter of this year to 1.170 billion euros. "Given the weakening of the macroeconomic climate in Europe, ING took proactive measures to reduce risk in the second quarter by selectively reducing its exposure to debt in southern European countries," explained the Dutch bank on Wednesday. It has also reduced its exposure to Greek, Irish, Italian and Portuguese debt.

10-billion bailout

"As the euro-zone crisis gets worse, we are accelerating our efforts to lower the risk on the bank's investment portfolio, and we have lowered our exposure to Spain in order to reduce the imbalance of financing in that country," explained Jan Hommen, the chief executive of the ING Group, which received 10 billion euros from the Netherlands' government in 2008 in order to cope with the global financial crisis.