FRANKFURT, Jan 14 (Reuters) - As of early December, UniCredit had granted about 18.3 billion euros ($22 billion) in state-guaranteed loans and had suspended payments on debt worth almost 25 billion euros, a top executive at the Italian bank said. In comments to Reuters, UniCredit’s CO-CEO Commercial Banking Western Europe Olivier Khayat said that 13.4 billion euros of the state-guaranteed loans had been disbursed in Italy, which also accounted for 20.3 billion of the loans under moratorium. UniCredit also has operations in Germany, Austria and eastern Europe. The figures compare with 14.2 billion euros in state-guaranteed loans for the group as of Sept. 30, and 29 billion euros in outstanding loans under moratorium then. Khayat said UniCredit expected the economy to rebound strongly from the pandemic-induced slump by the end of the current quarter or the start of the following one. “But that doesn’t mean there will be no casualties,” he said. “Everything ... with exposure to export is going to recover. Anything related to tourism and transportation will be still difficult.” Under outgoing CEO Jean Pierre Mustier UniCredit has taken a very cautious approach to the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, aggressively raising provisions in anticipation of loan losses once governments lift support schemes. UniCredit has guided for a yearly “cost of risk”, meaning the ratio between loan losses and average loan volumes, which entails about 2 billion euros in provisions in the fourth quarter. “You have to ... be honest. We have undertaken the right steps according to our assessment of the situation,” Khayat said. Commenting about consolidation trends in the industry, Khayat said it would be inevitable at some point because “you cannot serve an economy which is almost the size of the United States with a fragmented banking market like Europe’s”. At the same time, “we need to be careful about too much speculating about the structure and the nature of the industry. While you do this you put the pen on the table and you don’t do anything else. We are open for business”, he said.