A spokesman for the Economy Ministry, which oversees the program, declined to comment.
The state-backed loan guarantees are a key feature in the global response to the economic fallout from the pandemic. Spain and other European governments have pledged trillions of euros to help keep businesses afloat.
Europe’s fourth-largest economy had one of the continent’s strictest lockdowns in response to a deadly outbreak of the virus. The economy is also greatly dependent on the floundering tourism industry and its long-troubled labor market means the jobless rate could spike as high as 24% this year, according to central bank forecasts. In a worst-case-scenario, the Bank of Spain expects the economy to contract by as much as 15% in 2020.
Since Spain launched its program on March 17, banks have financed around 70 billion euros worth of loans –- about 54 billion of which are state-backed. That’s a much greater deployment of loan guarantees than in other European countries.
The loans are funneled through Spain’s Instituto de Credito Official, known as ICO, a state finance agency. Most of the guarantees have been deployed to help finance small and medium-sized companies. Some large businesses have also tapped the program. British Airways owner IAG SA borrowed around 1 billion euros through ICO to help its Spanish units Iberia and Vueling weather the collapse in travel demand.
In the event of a default, the Spanish government has pledged to back 80% of a loan to an SME and 70% for a large company.
When Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez first rolled out the program, some companies complained that banks were requiring them to purchase other products in order to secure financing, something known as cross-selling.
Other business people said banks required them to personally guarantee the loans, pledging their own homes, for instance. And some executives said the interest rates that banks were charging on the loans was unnecessarily high and not in line with the government’s guidelines.
Those complaints from borrowers have, for the most part, quieted down. One reason, according to officials, is that the government has rolled out the program in increments of around 20 billion euros each. That has allowed them to make tweaks along the way, detecting initial problems and then admonishing some banks to avoid cross-selling, for instance, in the following tranche.
Spain rolled out the final increment of the 100 billion euro program last week, accelerating the conversations to bolster the size of one of the country’s most significant responses to the coronavirus crisis.
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