Allied Irish Banks Posts First-Half Loss of 1.73 Billion Euros

Allied Irish Banks (AIB) announced a steep increase in first-half losses on provisions for past-due property loans.

The net loss in the first half of the year was 1.73 billion euros, compared with a loss of 786 million euros in the first half of 2009, The Wall Street Journal said. Operating income fell 24% to 2 billion euros, excluding 963 million euros in losses related to the National Asset Management Agency.

"AIB's results are more or less in line with expectations but that doesn't diminish the scale of what it has to achieve: massive recapitalization," Ronan Lyons, an independent economic analyst in Dublin, told DailyFinance.

The troubled bank said it expects a cumulative non-NAMA credit charge of 2.9 billion euros for the three years from 2010 to 2012.