Piraeus Bank offloads 507 mln euros of impaired corporate loans
Piraeus Bank has agreed to sell half a billion euros of non-performing corporate loans to an entity affiliated with Davidson Kempner Capital Management as part of efforts to clean up its balance sheet.
Greece’s largest lender by assets on Monday said it is selling loans with a gross book value of 507 million euros ($573 million) and has agreed a price of 240 million euros.
Piraeus said the sale is subject to approval by the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund (HFSF), Greece’s bank rescue fund, which holds a 26.2 percent stake in the bank.
Davidson Kempner Capital Management is a New York-based investment manager with more than $30 billion of assets under management.
The transaction will be capital neutral for Piraeus’s regulatory capital and will reduce its non-performing exposure (NPE) ratio by about 50 basis points, the bank said.
Piraeus Bank’s NPEs stood at 26.9 bln euros at the end of the first quarter, amounting to 52 percent of its total loans.
Last week Piraeus teamed up with Sweden’s Intrum to set up a platform to service its 27 billion euro bad loan portfolio.
[Reuters]
