Creative Commons

This dissertation was written as part of the LLM in Transnational and European Commercial Law, Banking Law and Arbitration/Mediation at the International Hellenic University. The 2008/2009 Global Financial Crisis uncovered deep fissures in the financial system the initial response towards the combat of which was the extensive use of public funds to rescue ailing too-big-to-fail financial institutions. The resulting strong public outcry and the detrimental effect on government finances led to the adoption of a wave of reforms trying to limit the impact any future crisis would have on taxpayers, such as the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive and the Crisis Communications, now constituting the backbone of the access and use of State Aid. In them, through an array of provisions, the legislators have tried to balance the texts’ varying objectives of competition policy and financial stability, providing for an increase in burden sharing requirements whilst still keeping the door open for the application of bail-outs in worst-case-scenarios. With the issue of Non-Performing Loans looming in the background and having examined in detail the interplay of the aforementioned texts, this dissertation attempts to comment on the stance taken in the in 2018 published AMC Blueprint regarding the abovementioned debate and to establish where it fits in the overall interaction of the abovementioned frameworks.