French bankers have warned that European financial institutions will be unfairly penalised compared with their US competitors by new capital requirement rules on the agenda at the G20 summit of leading industrial nations this month.

Baudouin Prot, the French Banking Federation’s chairman and chief executive of BNP Paribas, the country’s biggest bank, said the impact would be especially unjust as the financial crisis was caused in large part by failures in the US.