Sareb will sell assets worth 1500 million Euros this year.

The Minister of Economy, Luis de Guindos, declared yesterday, during his appearance in Parliament, that Sareb will start with approximately 200.000 assets, which have been acquired with an average discount of 52% on their value in books. They are divided into 107.000 properties (14.900 are plots) and the rest, credits from developers.

De Guindos also indicated that the Supervision Commission of Sareb has already been created and that the business plan forecasts asset sales of 1500 million Euros this year, 3% of the total (50.449 million Euros).

The individual revision of the assets is being done at the same time as the modification of the business plan, one of the requests of the international institutions, who have also warned against a conflict of interest among banks. “Sareb will make any potential conflict of interest public”, de Guindos pointed out. “Sareb will be difficult to manage and we are perfectly aware of that”, he explained. The assets they have received are, in some cases, “the worst in any home”, he stressed.

Nowadays, the team in charge of assessing Sareb´s assets, lead by the law firm Clifford Chance and made of more than 600 people, is working round the clock to comply with the deadline of the first analysis of 1500 assets: the 15th March.

The second phase, with the remaining 200.000 assets will be ready in two or three months, according to de Guindos.

This calendar is a real challenge, as Sareb awarded the process of valuation of the assets on the 21st February. At that time, the law firms (Gómez-Acebo Pombo, Pérez Llorca, Ramón y Cajal, Deloitte Legal and Broseta Abogados) lead by Clifford Chance (as well as the Spanish law firm Cuatrecasas who joined after the awarding), the auditing company KPMG, the real estate agencies Gesvalt, Knight Frank, Savills and Cushman & Wakefield, coordinated by CBRE and the technological services company IBM, started to compile information in order to draft a detailed due diligence of the assets coming from the nationalized savings banks. (…)

Only 1500 assets from group 1 were included in this first analysis, selected by Sareb´s auditing company PwC.

In order to carry out the due diligence, the 14 firms have assigned the workload equitably. Each law firm has to provide all legal information on the part they have been assigned, while the consulting agencies do the same on the real estate side and KPMG is in charge of the revision of the transfer prices. This will all be included in a technological data base prepared by IBM.

Some problems have arisen when several institutions did not have the digitalized information on the assets available. Sources close to the valuators believe that the valuation will surely not be finished before the 15th and the work will continue next weekend at law firms, auditing and consulting companies. Nevertheless, the objective is to hand the due diligence to Sareb next week.

Source: Expansión