The Slog isn’t surprised, because for much of the week before last, it was clear from European sources that by far the biggest lenders to ClubMed had been the German giants – notably Deutsche Bank, Postbank and Landesbank Berlin. Arnoud Vossen, secretary-general of the Committee of European Banking Supervisors, the pan-European banks regulator, told the FT yesterday, “We agreed with all supervisory authorities and with the banks in the exercise that there would be a bank-by-bank disclosure of sovereign risks.” The Germans appear to have been the major offenders in offering only the bank-book rather than full maturity level of liability – the scam revealed by The Slog just ahead of last Friday’s eventual report.

Bank lobbying reached fever pitch in Berlin at one point last week, a Slog contact told us: “They were keen to hide behind the disclosure laws we have here, although that was not the original agreement. In the end they got their way”. The German banks said officially this afternoon that they had ‘not been put under pressure by the authorities to disclose in full’, a superb piece of spin not unlike Gordon Brown saying that he had not put the Chilcot Enquiry under any pressure to leave him alone. The fact remains that a great many banks – and several German institutions – did publish sovereign exposure: and as this was relatively light, the obvious conclusion is that the opposite is true of those who didn’t.

Short of another major revelation of serious fraudulent misreporting, this topic is now closed – being as it is entirely academic: the market has reached its conclusions, and they are almost entirely negative.