A losing streak for the Hypo Alpe Adria Bank

Five years after being nationalised, the Austrian Bank Hypo Alpe Adria is again in turmoil: on July 2, its former CEO Wolfgang Kulterer and former Vice President Günter Striedinger were sentenced respectively to three-and-a-half years and four years in jail for fraud. Back in 2004, their crimes resulted in a loss to the bank of €5.5m, which contributed to its virtual bankruptcy in 2009, writes Der Standard, which leads with the headline "Hypo, chief resigns, ex-chiefs off to jail."

Also on July 2, the current chairman of the Bank, Gottwald Kranebitter, announced his resignation, which for Der Standard marks a further intensification of the "bank’s long decline".

How much money will the state still have to spend to avoid this new “Hypo-disaster”? demands Die Presse The Viennese daily notes that with only a few months left to run before the parliamentary elections in September, "the government is refusing to release information about the scale of the disaster”. On June 28, the European Commission came forward with a project to save the Bank, stating the amount of the funding required, but the ruling coalition – formed by the Christian-Democrats (ÖVP) and the Social Democrats – is refusing to release the figures.
The Minister of Finance Maria Fekter (ÖVP) estimates that the €700m budgeted for the six-month balance sheets of the bank will be enough, however, in its editorial Die Presse doesn’t go along with that at all —

In the best of cases (improbable) the wind-up of the Hypo Alpe Adria will cost the Austrian taxpayer €4.8 bn; if all goes wrong, the sum will soar to €8.3 bn. And tallying in the €2.2bn [that the Austrian state] has already invested, the cost of the bailout will be between €7 and €10.5bn.