Eight years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers sparked a global banking meltdown, many of Europe’s banks are still saddled with billions of euros in poorly performing loans, crimping their ability to lend and putting off investors.

“While a number of individual banks have clearly fared badly, the overall finding of the European Banking Authority – that Europe’s banks are resilient to another crisis – is heartening,” Anthony Kruizinga at PwC said.

Italy’s Monte dei Paschi, Austria’s Raiffeisen, Spain’s Banco Popular and two of Ireland’s main banks came out with the worst results in the EBA’s test of 51 European Union lenders.

“Whilst we recognise the extensive capital raising done so far, this is not a clean bill of health,” EBA Chairman Andrea Enria said in a statement. “There remains work to do.”

Italy’s largest lender, UniCredit, was also among those banks which fared badly, and it said it will work with supervisors to see if it should take further measures.

Germany’s biggest banks, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, were also among the 12 weakest banks in the test, along with British rival Barclays.

Monte dei Paschi, Italy’s third largest lender, had been scrambling to pull together a rescue plan and win approval for it from the European Central Bank ahead of the test results.

The Italian bank confirmed less than an hour before the results that it had finalised a plan to sell off its entire portfolio of non-performing loans and had assembled a consortium of banks to back a 5 billion euro capital increase.