NPL&REO News

Piraeus Bank in talks with Bain Capital to sell leasing portfolio

22 September, 2021

Piraeus Bank, one of Greece’s four largest lenders, is in talks with Bain Capital to sell a portfolio of leasing contracts as part of efforts to clear non-performing loans (NPL) from its balance sheet, bankers close to the talks told Reuters.

Greek banks have been making headway in their bid to sell, write off or restructure billions of euros of bad debt accumulated during the last financial crisis.

Recently, ratings agency Moody’s upgraded the four largest Greek banks and gave them a positive outlook, saying the move was primarily driven by their improving asset quality and good prospects for further boosting their recurring profitability.

Piraeus Bank’s portfolio of leasing contracts, dubbed project Sunshine, has a gross book value of about 530 million euros.

Bain Capital is a multi-asset alternative investment firm.

In June last year Bain Capital Credit, a unit of the group, bought 1.6 billion euros of corporate NPL from Greece’s National Bank.

In 2018, Piraeus Bank agreed to sell a 1.45 billion euro portfolio of secured, non-performing business loans to Bain Capital Credit as part of moves to reduce its bad debts.

Original story: Reuters | Staff
Photo: Piraeus website
Edition: Prime Yield

CGD and Novo Banco choose the buyers for their NPL portfolios’ by mid October

20 September, 2021

Portugal’s Novo Banco (NB) and Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) have two portfolios of non-performing loans (NPLs) for sale, called Harvey and Mercury, respectively. Tenders for the purchase of the respective portfolios are in the final stages and there are several interested parties in the race, and buyers/winners should be chosen on 15 October, 2021.

According to the newspaper Jornal Económico, which quotes a market source, there are three candidates in the final stage of the tender to buy the NPL Harvey portfolio and four in the final race for Mercury.

For each of the operations four interested parties have been chosen to move on to the negotiation phase, but in the case of NB one of the candidates, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, will not move forward, the paper said, adding that the three finalists for the Harvey project are the DDM Group, Deva Capital and DK Partners.

At stake are the debts of 20 single names – eight corporate and 12 real estate-related -, with the Project Harvey project encompassing NPL with a gross value of 640 million euros.

As for the Mercury portfolio, one of the four funds interested in buying is, according to Jornal Económico, the North American Cerberus. This is a granular portfolio and not of large debtors, with CGD’s portfolio being of collateralised (secured) NPL.

The Mercury portfolio comprises 100 million euros of residential NPL and a small pool of REOs [real estate owned] in the amount of 10 million euros.

Original story: Jornal Económico | Maria Teixeira Alves
Photo: CGD website
Translation & Edition: Prime Yield

GREECE Greece’s NPL ratio to fall to single digit next year

14 September, 2021

The Greek banks’ non-performing loans (NPL) stock should fall to single-digit rate in 2022, Finance Minister Christos Staikouras said.

“The correct, serious and methodical work done in the last two years, under the coordination of the former deputy Finance Minister George Zavvos, continues,” the Finance Minister said in an announcement.

“According to Bank of Greece data, Greek banks’ NPLs totalled 29.4 billion euros in June 2021, 20.3% of total loans, recording an impressive decline during the last two years”.

The stock of NPLs has fallen by around 46 billion euros since New Democracy took over the government of the country (it was 75.3 billion euros in June 2019) and around 78 billion down from the peak in March 2016 (107.2 billion euros).

“This significant reduction is the result of an integrated and coherent strategy followed by the finance ministry through the successful programme ‘Hercules’ which has been expanded, and specific interventions implemented to contain the creation of a new wave of non-performing loans because of the pandemic crisis.”

Original Story: : Greek City Times |Athens Bureau
Photo: Photo by Jonte Remos in FreeImages.com
Edition: Prime Yield

Bank deposits rise in July to almost €172 billion

2 September, 2021

The bank deposits of individuals and companies stood at €171.7 billion at the end of July, a €1.8 billion increase from June, according to Bank of Greece data.

Corporate deposits increased by over a billion, including €477 million from insurance companies.

Overall, corporate liquidity stood at €35.3 billion at the end of July, €11.4 billion more than in March 2020, when the first pandemic lockdown hit the economy.

Insurance companies’ liquidity stood at €5.1 billion.

Term deposits declined by €976 million month-on-month to €31.6 billion, as lower interest rates have been dissuading depositors from locking in their money.

Original Story: Ekathimerini |News
Photo: Photo by Jonte Remos from FreeImages
Edition: Prime Yield

Spanish banks NPL rate at its lowest since 2009

2 September, 2021

Spanish banks’ non-performing loan (NPL) rate have retreated to its lowest since 2009.

According to the latest statistical series published by the Bank of Spain, in June the NPL from NFCs and households in the sheets of the Spanish banking institutions fell to 4.4%, compared with 4.55% in May, when it had risen slightly.

In fact, this 4.4% ratio is the lowest level recorded since March 2009, when it stood at 4.26%. It then began to climb month after month, reaching an all-time high of 13.62% in December 2013.

Doubtful loans also fell by 1.76% to 54,218 million euros, the lowest volume in recent years.

Moreover, according to provisional data from the Bank of Spain, the volume of total credit increased by 1.6% in June to 1.232 trillion euros, after a slowdown in loans granted in the previous two months.

Original Story: Cinco Dias | News
Photo: Photo by Victor Iglesias from FreeImages
Edition & Translation: Prime Yield

Portugal’s 5 larger banks with aggregated profits of €708 billion

1 September, 2021

The five main banks based in Portugal recorded, in the first half of the year, an aggregate profit of €708.4 million.

Together, Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD), Novo Banco, BCP, BPI and Santander Totta recorded aggregate profits of €708.4 million.

Novo Banco announced profits of €137.7 million in the first six months of the year, an improvement compared to the losses recorded since its foundation, in 2014.

Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) recorded the highest profit among the five largest banks, with €294 million in the first half, after €249 million in the same period last year.

The second largest contribution came from BPI, with €183 million in profit, which compares with the 43 obtained in the first six months of 2020.

In fourth place, after Novo Banco’s profits, which place it in third place in the table of positive net results, was Santander Totta, with a profit of €81.4 million in the first half, compared with €172.9 million in the same period of 2020.

Finally, BCP profited €12.3 million, greatly impacted by losses of €112.7 million in the Polish operation, when it had profited €76 million in the first half of 2020.

Original Story: The Portugal News | TPL/ Lusa
Photo: CGD website
Edition: Prime Yield

Alpha Bank to get rid of over €8 billion in NPL

1 September, 2021

Alpha Bank wants to get rid of over €8 billion in bad loans through securitization and other operations in 2022, aiming to reduce its bad loans ratio into the single digits.

In its Cyprus subsidiary, €2.2 billion in bad loans have been transferred to special purpose vehicles.

Cyprus and Romania will remain Alpha’s sole foreign subsidiaries.

Original Story: Ekathimerini | News
Photo: Alpha Bank website
Edition: Prime Yield

Servihabitat to manage €1.2 billion portfolio from Kutxabank

1 September, 2021

Servihabitat, the subsidiary of Lone Star (80%) and Caixa Bank (20%), won the contract to manage Kutxabank’s real estate asset portfolio, valued at €1.2 billion.

The bank’s portfolio is made up of 10,000 assets in Spain, concentrated in Andalusia and the Basque Country. Of this, 50% is residential and commercial, and the other half is land.

Iheb Nafaa, CEO of Servihabitat, explained: “Our commitment is to become a servicer with the guarantee of offering a quality service with a differential value that sets us apart from many other competitors. As a multi-client servicer with exclusive management capacity for our clients, and with nationwide territorial capillarity, we have been strategically reinforcing our structure to continue to be a benchmark in the sector.”

Neinor has held the contract until May 2022 for seven years but was eliminated in the process at the beginning of July. From that month, Servihabitat will take over for the next five years.

In 2020, Servihabitat closed 12.2 % more deals than in 2019. By 2021, it has focused its strategic plan on the management of land, mobilising land markets that will enable it to expand the supply of housing.

Original Story: El Confidencial|Ruth Ugalde
Photo: Photo by Philipp K for FreeImages
Edition: Prime Yield

NBG selects DoValue-led consortium as preferred bidder

10 August, 2021

DoValue revealed that a consortium of the financial company, Bain Capital and Fortress has been chosen by National Bank of Greece (NBG) as the preferred bidder in relation to Project Frontier for a short period of talks.

NBG, Greece’s second-largest lender by assets, is looking to offload a portfolio of soured loans known as Project Frontier.

Earlier, NBG said it was in exclusive talks with the consortium for the sale of non-performing credit.

Original Story: Reuters| Reuters Staff
Photo: Photo by Michalis Famelis / Wikimedia Commons
Edition: Prime Yield

Santander puts for sale its credit exposure in Hesperia

10 August, 2021

Santander is negotiating the sale of its credit exposure on the Hesperia hotel group, a 136 million euros loan portfolio, with with several opportunistic funds, such as Apollo, Bain Capital and Bybrook.

According to the Spanish journal El Confidencial, the bank has already received offers for this loan portfolio, which includes eleven of the group’s hotels and offices as collateral. Led by Santander itself, the transaction is not expected to be heavily discounted, as the loans are up to date with payments.

The sale represents Santander’s exit from Hesperia’s credit pool. One of the largest hotel groups in the country, in 2014 the company controlled by the Galician Castro Sousa family had to sell assets to meet bank requirements to refinance debt, at a time when the bank was already Hesperia’s main financier.

At the present, Hesperia is awaiting approval from the State Industrial Ownership Corporation (Sepi) for a 55 million euros aid package to deal with the effects left by Covid-19, which has the tourism and hotel sector as one of the main victims. Specifically, last March the group joined other hotel companies that applied for aid from the Solvency Support Fund for Strategic Companies managed by the Sepi with European resources.

Hesperia has a portfolio of 28 hotels in Spain with a total of 4,500 rooms, as well as four establishments in Venezuela. The group’s expansion plans for 2021 have so far focused on Latin America and the United States. In 2019, Hesperia posted revenue of 137 million euros, in line with the previous year, and made a profit of 15.5 million euros, up from 22 million euros in 2018.

In recent months, transactions have been carried out on hotels operated by Hesperia on a leaseback basis. In July, the Grifols family, through the company Scranton, acquired the Hesperia Presidente hotel in Barcelona, located on Avenida Diagonal, for 125 million euros (including CAPEX). Likewise, in March 2020, the fund manager Meridia acquired the Hesperia Barcelona del Mar hotel, located on Calle Espronceda in the Catalan capital.

Original Story: Eje Prime | News
Photo: Facebook Santander
Edition & Translation: Prime Yield

BCP looks for new owners for a €145 million REO and NPL portfolio

10 August, 2021

Portuguese bank BCP is looking for new owners for a portfolio made of nonperforming loans (NPL) and real estate (REO) in Algarve with a gross value of 145 million euros, according to digital ECO News.

Most of the assets are connected to the luxury resorts Castro Marim and Monte Rei, with the portfolio in question to be named “Project Green” after the golf camps included in those touristic complexes. It also includes other real estate assets located in Tavira, São Brás de Alportel and Loulé, notes Eco.

According to the same source, the bank lead by Miguel Maia is already in the market taking conversations with interested potential buyers.

Castro Marim and Monte Rei resorts had initially been included in the “Project Ellis”, which sale to David Kempner was completed by the end of 2020. At the time, they were reportedly taken from that portfolio.

With over 400 hectars of land. Monte Rei is located a few kilometres from Vila Nova de Cacela, and includes villas, houses, flats and plots for construction, besides golf courses designed by the American Jack Nicklaus. The Castro Marim resort also has golf courses, villas and individual plots.

Original Story: Jornal de Negócios | Staff
Photo: MBCP website
Edition & Translation: Prime Yield

Foreign funds control a third of all bank loans in Greece

3 August, 2021

One in three loans owed by households and corporations are already owned by foreign funds, fueling their growing presence and turning them into vital players in economic developments. By the end of the year, in fact, they are expected to control 50% of entire private sector debt.

The sum of the credit system loans, serviced or not, comes to 155 billion euros according to end-March data, with 43 billion euros of that already in foreign hands. By year-end, and after the conclusion of the securitizations planned by the four systemic banks, that sum will rise to 70 billion euros, and is set to grow further next year, which is when the streamlining of banks’ financial accounts will have been completed through the state asset protection mechanism known as “Hercules.”

The increase in the volume of loans being passed onto funds is marked by the completion of National Bank’s transactions for the “Frontier” package amounting to 6 billion euros, the Sunrise 1 and 2 securitizations by Piraeus and the Mexico package securitization by Eurobank within this year.

Alpha and National have planned sales and securitizations worth over 10 billion euros next year.

Original Story: Ekathimerini | Evgenia Tzortzi
Photo: Photo by Markellos P. from FreeImages
Edition: Prime Yield

Blackstone opens up Aliseda to third parties for land management

3 August, 2021

The real estate platform is seeking partnerships with developers by offering the structure of the US fund to landowners.

Blackstone is looking to sell the land it has in stock. For that, the US fund will ally with developers through the opening of its servicer Aliseda, which manages a 800 million euros portfolio of land, according to El Confidencial.

The aim is to open up the servicer to third parties through the transfer of the land, taking advantage of its infrastructure to ally with developers.

The company claims that Blackstone’s infrastructure allows it to offer services at marginal cost. The fund assures that through this new formula it will be able to offer projects to the administrations to increase the supply of housing.

Blackstone’s land bank in Spain came from Banco Popular, which after its merger with Santander sold it through Aliseda. The fund acquired them after increasing its stake in the servicer to 51%.

Aliseda has a team of 80 people dedicated exclusively to urban development management in Spain. The first major project where the servicer wants to implement its new strategy is Sareb’s Neo Project, a tender launched by the entity to find a partner to help it manage a portfolio of land valued at 1.12 billion euros, on which it is planning to build 60,000 homes.

Original Story: Eje Prime |News
Photo: BlackStone Linked In
Edition & Translation: Prime Yield

CGD, Santander and Novo Bank relaunch NPL sales

3 August, 2021

Caixa Geral de Depósitos will go ahead with the sale of a nonperforming loan (NPL) portfolio of more than 120 million euros in the second half of the year.

According to Economico, the Portuguese State owned bank has already launched the sales process of the Mercury Project, a granular portfolio of collateralised NPLs with a total value of 128 milion euros, and which not include NPL from large debtors.

At the same time, the Portuguese diary added, both Novo Banco and Santander Totta are also triggering the sale of their own NPL portfolios.

Original Story: Jornal Económico |Maria Teixeira
Photo: CGD Website
Edition & Translation: Prime Yield

Parliament approves the 18-month extension of the Hercules program

30 July, 2021

The Greek Parliament voted for the 18-month extension of the Hercules program, designed to reduce the stock of nonperforming loans.

The bill also included amendments to the bankruptcy code and passed on the strength of ruling New Democracy votes alone. All opposition parties rejected it, with the exception of support for single articles.

Arguing in support of the controversial bill, Deputy Finance Ministers George Zavvos and Apostolos Vesyropoulos called the bill a result of “the government’s strategic decision to reduce NPLs to single-digit numbers in order to boost the real economy.”Opposition parties accused the government of boosting the banking system without guaranteeing smaller businesses access to funding, and without protecting vulnerable borrowers from foreclosure auctions.

Original Story: Ekathimerini |Newsroom
Photo: Photo by Jonte Remos from FreeImages
Edition: Prime Yield

NPL won’t be a brake on credit

28 July, 2021

The “expectation of continued support for the most affected sectors” by the pandemic together with the end of the moratoria regime leads the Portuguese banks to rule out an increase in credit restrictions. And this time, bad credit won’t be a brake to new financing, concludes the Bank of Portugal (BdP) in one of its latest papers, according to a new from ECO.

“Progress made by the banking system since the last crisis to make it more robust and resilient to shocks will be contributing to a lower impact of NPLs on lending.”, says the BdP.Even with the deadline for the moratoria ending in September, the surveyed banks are calm. According to the Bank of Portugal, the largest national financial institutions “expect the NPL ratio to have practically no impact on lending criteria,” which, according to the survey, have become only slightly more restrictive than before the pandemic.

Original Story: ECO |Paulo Moutinho
Photo: Banco de Portugal website
Edition & Translation: Prime Yield

Cerberus buys a €500 million REO portfolio from Cajamar

26 July, 2021

Spanish cooperative bank Cajamar has agreed the sale of a real estate portfolio (REO) composed of 6,000 assets with a total Face Value of about 500 million euros to a subsidiary of Cerberus Capital Management LP. The transaction, which is subject to all necessary corporate and regulatory approvals, is expected to close by the end of 2021.

The portfolio, named “Jaguar”, is composed of 6,000 residential assets, commercial premises, offices, and land. The assets are located mainly in Andalusia, the Valencian Community, Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and the Region of Murcia.

This transaction represents the largest NPE transaction in the Spanish market since the outbreak of COVID, and the largest divestment ever completed by Cajamar.

Alantra acted as financial advisor to Cajamar on the transaction, which represents the fifth project completed for the Spanish bank after Projects Baracoa, Escullos, Galeón, and Tango.

Uría Menendez acted as legal advisor Cajamar, while Clifford Chance was the legal advisor of Cerberus.

Original Story: Cajamar | News
Photo: Cerberus
Edition & Translation: Prime Yield

Novo Banco puts the €640 million NPL Harvey Project for sale

23 July, 2021

Novo Banco has just put an 640 million portfolio of nonperforming loans (NPL) of major debtors up for sale. The institution led by António Ramalho wants to reduce the bad debt ratio from 8% at the end of March to 5% within two years.

With a gross value of 640 million, the Harvey Project is set up of loans in default from the bank’s 20 major debtors, including 8 corporate loans and 12 other loans linked to the real estate sector.

According to the online Eco news this is the new name given from the bank to the credit portfolio that was supposed to be Nata III.

Original Story: Jornal de Negócios | Staff
Photo: Novo Banco website
Edition & Translation: Prime Yield

Pandemic-created NPLs “will be manageable” says Finance Minister

20 July, 2021

Any increase in the stock of nonperforming loans create by the pandemic crisis is expected to be “manageable” for the country’s four systemic banks, Deputy Finance Minister Giorgos Zavvos said.

Speaking in Parliament, Zavvos said that the European Central Bank and the Single Supervisory Mechanism have not offered any evidence of an imminent explosion of NPLs because of the pandemic, adding that “the evidence we have so far from the four systemic banks showed that the stock of nonperforming loans from the pandemic will not exceed 4-5 billion euros. In other words, it will be a sum that is completely manageable under the Hercules program which is implemented by the government and operates with the confidence of international investors.”

The Hercules program, designed to reduce the stock of NPLs, has tangible results, the Greek minister said, adding that it helped in the reduction of NPLs by 32 billion euros during the initial period of its implementation “without costing Greek taxpayers even a single euro.”

Original Story: Ekathimerini | Newsroom
Photo: Photo by Takis Kolokotronis from FreeImages
Edition: Prime Yield

Santander sells 600 million NPL portfolio to Marathon

19 July, 2021

Banco Santander agreed to sell a nonperforming loan (NPL) portfolio to Marathon Asset Management LP as part of its strategy to clean its balance sheet, according to a news advanced in first-hand by the Spanish newspaper El Confidencial.

According to a source familiar to the transactions quoted by the newspaper, the Spanish bank has disposed of 600 million euros of NPL, which the U.S.-based fund bought for 100 million euros. This is the first time Santander has offloaded default loans since the coronavirus pandemic began.

This portfolio is largely made up of default loans from small and medium-sized companies, particularly hotel firms.

Original Story: Market Watch | Carlos Lopez Perea
Photo: Photo by Jason Hochman from FreeImages
Edition & Translation: Prime Yield