Private banks led the list of those with the highest profits in the first quarter. Garanti Bankası had the highest first quarter earnings, posting TL 1.08 billion in consolidated net profits. Akbank followed Garanti with TL 1.03 billion, a 76 percent increase over the same quarter of last year. İş Bankası came third with TL 955 million, representing a 47 percent jump in consolidated net profits in first three months compared to first quarter of 2009. Yapı Kredi enjoyed a 20 percent rise and increased its first quarter net profits to TL 564 million while the state-owned Halkbank made TL 515 million in net profits, a 41.3 percent increase in the given period. Vakıfbank, another state-owned bank, followed Halk with TL 305 million.Bank Asya was the best performing of the country’s four participation banks, with net profits of TL 59 million in the first quarter, a 12.5 percent rise over the same months of 2009.
Turkish banks were criticized for their indifference to the non-financial sector’s need for loans during the 2009 crisis. Observers say this was not because banks did not have the cash to extend loans, but that they found relatively more profitable ways of investing. Banks invested their money in Treasury bonds. Treasury interest rates stood at 16 percent at the end of 2008, but fell to 7 percent by the end of 2009. Hence, this benefited the financial institutions. Of the first 100 companies that will be paying the highest amounts of corporate tax for 2009, 27 were banks, recent Revenues Administration (GİB) data have shown.
