Move to give ECB supervisory role over all eurozone banks

That would include Germany’s Sparkassen savings banks and Genossenschaftsbanken cooperative banks, which Germany had hoped would be exempt when it signalled it wanted supervision only over the biggest 25 banks, German business newspaper Handelsblatt said, citing Commission sources.

The Commission’s proposal, due on September 11, envisages national authorities supervising day-to-day business and the ECB only intervening where it sees “dangerous risks”, Handelsblatt said. Outside the eurozone, national banking supervisors would stay in charge of their banks, the paper reported.

European Union leaders agreed at the end of June to set up a single banking supervisor in Europe as a pre-condition to letting the eurozone’s rescue funds directly inject cash into lenders, without lending to a government first.

It is part of a wider EU effort to stop the banking and eurozone debt crisis feeding each other.

Stefaan de Rynck, spokesman for Michel Barnier, the European commissioner for financial services who is drafting the proposal, said how the ECB would work with local regulators on the ground and with the pan-EU European Banking Authority (EBA) watchdog was still being fleshed out.

The ECB may need to have supervisory power over all banks as not just large ones have suffered problems.

“It is hard to define what is a major bank, what is a systemic bank, so we need to make sure that in the banking union that supervisory system is able to cover all banks,” Mr de Rynck told the EU executive body’s regular brief- ing.

“The ECB has to play the pivotal role”, he said.

The Commission was also looking at how non-eurozone countries could opt into the banking union and how to deal with an EU treaty bar on the ECB supervising insurers, a person familiar with the discussions comment- ed.

Some insurers sell their products through banks.