March 27 (SeeNews) - The share of non-performing loans (NPLs) in the credit portfolio of Romanian banks rose to 9.75% at the end of January from 9.46% a month earlier, data from the Romanian central bank, BNR, indicated on Monday.
Compared to the same month last year, the NPL ratio was 3.71 percentage points lower in January, according to a monthly report posted on the central bank's website.
The bad loan rate in the Romanian banking sector stood at 20.39% in March 2014, when BNR introduced changes in its calculation methodology.
The central bank called on the local banks to start removing fully-provisioned NPLs from their balance sheet, thus reducing their NPL ratio.
In 2015-2016, Romania led the NPLs market in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) with estimated sales and ongoing transactions of 5 billion euro ($3.7 billion), a survey by global tax consultant Deloitte showed.
The survey covered transactions conducted between January 2015 and October 2016, as well as ongoing ones.
Romania completed NPL transactions valued at 3.5 billion euro in 2015-2016 and has ongoing transactions worth 1.5 billion euro, Deloitte said.
(1 euro=4.5500 lei)