THE DOOR IS OPEN FOR LARGE AMOUNT GUARANTEE SERVICES
The State Aid Supervising Office of the Finance Ministry (PM-TVI) has released the necessary statement making it possible for Garantiqa Hitelgarancia Zrt. to contribute to the financing of small- and medium size enterprises with a bigger subsidy until the end of 2010. The guarantee limit is rising, the amount of the risk taken over from the banks is increasing, and Garantiqa can also undertake guarantees for companies that exceed the limit of de minimis aid.
During the past few weeks, Garantiqa Hitelgarancia Zrt. has managed to reach the mitigation of several points of the strict competition rules of the European Union. With this recently issued statement of PM-TVI, all administrative pre-requisites are fulfilled for Garantiqa to help the loan uptakes of small- and medium size enterprises at considerably better conditions - said György Radnai, CEO of Garantiqa.
One of the major mitigation points is that from now on, Garantiqa can not only guarantee 80% of the enterprise's loan amount, but the guarantee undertaking can reach even 90%, if the amount of the loan does not exceed the total annual wage bill of the beneficiary. Additionally, becasue of block excemption, the amount of the guarantee sum undertaken for the payment liabilities of a company, has increased by 3 1/2 times in cases when the loan is used for investment, employment, environmental or R&D purposes. In the case of these loans, the guarantee amount given to one enterprise can increase from 725 million HUF (2,5 million EUR) to 2,5 billion HUF. "This is an extremely important change, because during the past period, we can even see such companies among our clients, that are part of the SME sector's top section, whose credit need is much greater than the old limit" - said the CEO.
Another important mitigation is that even such enterprises are entitled to get guarantees with a state counter-guarantee from now on, which got into a difficult situation due to the crisis after the middle of 2008. This means that the banks and their clients can come to Garantiqa with guarantee applications even if the finance institution would terminate the loan without the implementation of a new collateral.
Because of TVI's statement, Garantiqa is now one of the institutions that can give a temporary, extraordinary aid of 500.000 Euros. This frame, approved by the EU recently, means that the institutions in the member states that support enterprises can, temporarily, without any special permission, also support such companies, which would otherwise not be entitled for state aid. This generally happens in the life of a company when it crosses the value limit of the "small amount aid" (of 200.000 EUR) that it is entitled to get within a period of 3 years, or if the individual guarantee amount exceeds 2.5 million EUR. Now, these enterprises have a possibility to use further state aid up to 500.000 EUR, such as a credit guarantee backed up by a state counter-guarantee.