6 August 2010

Banco Espírito Santo and Santander Totta, SGPS asked Banco de Portugal to carry out stress tests to their sub-consolidated activity with the same approach as the exercise coordinated by the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS), in cooperation with the European Central Bank, published on 23 July 2010.

The exercise coordinated by the CEBS entailed those banking groups to be tested solely on the highest prudential consolidated level, taking into account that it is the appropriate one on supervisory grounds and also given that it avoids that the same set of institutions is covered in more than one consolidation level and/or jurisdiction. Under the CEBS framework, it was agreed that national supervisory authorities would be allowed to conduct and publish additional stress tests to institutions operating under their supervision with the methodology and the assumptions underlying the exercise coordinated by the CEBS if their release would not occur before 6 August 2010.

It is in this context that the results of the two above-mentioned institutions are now published.

It should be underlined that these results are not part of the exercise coordinated at the level of the European Union and thus will not be published by the CEBS.