BLOM Bank published its unaudited financial statements for the first half of 2021 revealing a 95.77% y-o-y drop in net after tax profit to $1.64 million, down from $38.81 million in H1-2020. Said profit figure, however, incorporates a $7.48 million extraordinary net profit from discontinued operations, which when factored out would result in an operating after-tax loss of around $5.84 million. In details, the bank’s net interest income rose by 46.64% y-o-y to around $737.41 million, outweighing the 25.54% drop in net fee & commission income to $35.88 million, while net losses on financial assets & other operating income amounted to $269.64 million (compared to a smaller loss of $79.84 million in H1-2020). The increase in net interest income owes to the sizeable decrease in the cost of funds as banks lowered interest rates paid on customer deposits to near zero levels particularly on foreign currency deposits. It is worth noting that the bank recorded some $326.40 million in net impairment losses in H1-2021. In this respect, net operating income dropped by 8.49% y-o-y to $177.25 million. However, the bank’s total operating expenses rose by 5.03% y-o-y to $143.75 million in H1-2021 resulting in a 41.23% annual drop in profit before tax from continuing operations to $33.54 million. On the balance sheet front, BLOM Bank’s consolidated assets contracted shyly by 0.47% in H1-2021 to $29.58 billion in the light of the 15.30% contraction in the net loans portfolio to $2.64 billion, noting that cash and balances with Central Banks remained almost stable at $18.38 billion. Customer deposits, moreover, dropped by 1.49% during the first half of the current year to around $20.75 billion. In this context, the bank’s ratio of net loans-to-customer deposits regressed to 12.74% at end of June 2021, with shareholders’ equity ending H1-2021 down by 0.27% at $3.18 billion.