RBI's 2015 profit boosted by accounting change

Raiffeisen Bank International on February 01 unveiled a preliminary net profit of 383 million euros ($417 million) for 2015, which was helped by banking supervisors asking it to re-allocate write-downs to its 2014 balance sheet.
The Austrian Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel asked emerging Europe's second-biggest lender to transfer goodwill impairment charges for its Polish unit Polbank and provisions for losses from 2015 to 2014, a Raiffeisen spokesman said.
The rebookings amounted to more than 93 million for its Polish bank, which it expects to sell this year, and totalled 124 million euros including the provisions, he said. This widened the 2014 net loss to 617 million euros instead of the 493 million previously announced.
The bank reported a Common Equity Tier 1 ratio, a measure of its capital strength, of about 11.5 percent for 2015 on a fully loaded basis, compared with 10.0 percent in 2014. RBI targets a CET 1 ratio of 12 percent by the end of next year. RBI repeated that it did not plan to pay a dividend for 2015.