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BNP Paribas Profit Rose 18% in First Quarter

PARIS — BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank, said on Thursday that its first-quarter profit rose on the back of a strong performance at its corporate and investment banking business and a decline in the euro that increased its dollar-based returns.

The bank, based in Paris, posted net income of just over 1.6 billion euros, or $1.8 billion, up about 18 percent in the period of January through March compared with a year earlier. Its revenue rose 11.6 percent to €11.1 billion.

The quarterly earnings were better than the roughly €1.5 billion that analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had anticipated.

Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, the bank’s chief executive, said in a statement that results had been driven by “gradual recovery in demand for loans in the eurozone, good business growth in America and in Asia, and the strong business of major clients in capital markets sustained revenue growth.”

Improved credit demand is welcome to businesses and policy makers in the 19-member eurozone, as lending is an essential component of business investment, and it suggests the economy may finally have begun to pick up steam.

On Wednesday, the European Central Bank said that loans to nonfinancial firms rose 0.1 percent in March compared with a year earlier — the first annual increase since March 2012.

BNP Paribas is the largest of the French banks, ahead of Société Générale and Crédit Agricole, and it is the first to report first-quarter results this year. The bank’s market capitalization of more than €71 billion makes it second in the eurozone only to Santander, a Spanish lender, and puts it far ahead of its German rival Deutsche Bank.

The bank said its corporate and investment banking unit posted a 24 percent rise in revenue from a year earlier, while its international financial services business posted a 20 percent gain. Its domestic French business, weighed down by the country’s moribund economy, posted a 2.3 percent increase.

BNP Paribas said the first-quarter costs included €245 million to cover its 2015 contribution to the eurozone’s Single Resolution Fund. It was the first time that it and its peers had to contribute to the fund, which was created by member states to ensure that money is available to rescue and restructure failing banks if needed.

It also posted €339 million in one-time gains, more than three times the year-earlier figure. That included €67 million from the merger of Klépierre, a commercial real estate company in which BNP Paribas is a big investor, and Corio, a Dutch property company.

The bank said its balance sheet “is rock solid,” with its common equity Tier-1 capital ratio, a measure of its ability to withstand financial shocks, at 10.3 percent at the end of March.

BNP Paribas hopes this week to close a painful chapter in its history. Final sentencing is scheduled for Friday in the criminal case brought by regulators in New York and Washington over allegations that the bank violated United States sanctions by having processed dollar transactions on behalf of blacklisted countries including Sudan and Iran. BNP Paribas pleaded guilty last year to criminal charges and agreed to pay $8.9 billion in penalties to settle the case.

The bank in April won a Labor Department waiver that allows it to continue operating asset management businesses in the United States.

In its results statement on Thursday, BNP Paribas said it was “actively implementing the remediation plan agreed as part of the comprehensive settlement with the U.S. authorities and is continuing to reinforce its internal control and compliance system.”

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