Hamburg  - HSH Nordbank, a troubled German public-owned bank, confirmed Wednesday that the world financial crisis had wiped 500 million euros (700 million dollars) off the value of its assets.

The Hamburg-based bank said the third-quarter write-down would include 120 million euros that vanished in last week's collapse of Wall Street investment banking firm Lehman Brothers.

After a 2007 write-down of 1.3 billion euros and a first-half-2008 write-down of 511 million euros, the new setback increases the HSH Nordbank loss to 2.3 billion euros.

The bank is controlled by two German states, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein.

A bank spokesman stressed that the losses were on paper only and that it was conceivable some assets could recover.

In Berlin, meanwhile, parliamentarians were questioning Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck and the chief executive of federally owned bank KfW, Ulrich Schroeder, about that bank's losses in the crisis.

Without receiving anything in return, the federal government's soft-loans banking arm erroneously paid Lehman Brothers 350 million euros last week on the day the US bank failed. (dpa)