UniCredit – To cut cut 8,500 jobs by 2018

Leading Italian bank UniCredit has posted a massive loss of 14 billion euros for 2013.

Much of that was as it wrote off bad loans that it knows will never be repaid, along with so-called goodwill – the paper value of assets – in Italy, Austria and central and eastern Europe. 

The writedowns are to clean up its balance sheet ahead of checks on the financial health of European lenders by the region’s regulators.

Without them Unicredit would have made a 916.5 million euros net profit in 2013, according to the consensus of forecasts from a poll of analysts carried out by Thomson Reuters

It will also cut 8,500 jobs by 2018 There will be 5,700 layoffs in Italy, 1,500 in Germany and 900 in Austria.

via UniCredit shocks with 14 billion euro balance sheet clean-up | euronews, corporate.