Charles Blackburn Quits Deutsche Bank For Oaktree

13 April 2015 – CoStar Finance

Charles Blackburn, head of Deutsche Bank’s EMEA commercial real estate special situations group, has quit the investment bank after nearly 10 years and is expected to join Oaktree Capital Management later in the summer, CoStar News has learned.

Blackburn is thought to be taking up a senior role continuing a remit for distressed real estate debt and equity investments at the US private equity firm, having already left Deutsche Bank.

Earlier this morning, CoStar News revealed that Oaktree has moved to exclusive negotiations to acquire FMS Wertmanagement’s Project Gaudi CRE loan portfolio for a price thought to be just north of €500m.

At the turn of the year, Blackburn’s Deutsche Bank team won NAMA’s €287m Project Boyne, loans secured by property developer Willie Smyth, paying around €95m, and just before Christmas the team also won a €234m tranche of the Project Kaplan NPL from Sareb.

The most significant NPL win of last year by Blackburn’s team was the acquisition of around €1.5bn in tranches from IBRC’s giant €9.3bn Project Stone NPL, acquiring the two largest tranches by nominal balance and the highest quality of assets in the loan portfolio.

Deutsche Bank also won tranches of IBRC’s Project Quartz and NAMA’s Project Spring.

Blackburn joined Deutsche Bank in September 2005, prior to which he spent three years at O’Connor Capital Partners.

All parties declined to comment.

Original story: CoStar Finance (by James Wallace)

Edited by: Carmel Drake

Sabadell Puts €250m NPL Portfolio Up For Sale

29 January 2015 – Expansión

Opportunistic funds / “Project Cadi” includes non-performing loans that the entity once granted to real estate developers

Banco Sabadell is making progress in its strategy to reduce the volume of foreclosed assets and bad debt on its books. The financial group led by Josep Oliu, which today releases its results for 2014, has just put an NPL portfolio worth €250 million up for sale.

According to market sources, the so-called Project Cadi includes non-performing loans that were once granted to real estate developers. Through Solvia, Sabadell is taking a very active role in packaging these types of loans, in the face of strong buyer interest from opportunistic funds that are now active in the Spanish market. At the beginning of the month, the bank already disposed of another portfolio worth €435 million (Project Tritón), which included 630 non-performing loans to small- and medium-sized developers, as well as 700 foreclosed assets in Valencia, Andalucía, Cataluña and the Balearic Islands. This sale was put together through a bond issue, acquired by Deutsche Bank and Hipoges. Sabadell may already be sounding out the market with a view to selling other portfolios over the next few months.

This type of transaction reflects the confidence that funds have in the recovery of the real estate market in Spain. In parallel, banks are interested in this kind of transaction because they lighten their balance sheets and allow them to generate income from assets that are no longer productive and that have already been provisioned. According to sector sources, these transactions are closed with discounts of around 75%, which means that the funds are paying the financial institutions 25% of the nominal value of the loans.

The largest transaction of this kind in Spain was closed in 2014 by Blackstone, which acquired a €6,392 million mortgage portfolio from Catalunya Banc. Lone Star and JP Morgan also bought loans from Eurohypo amounting to €4,500 million. Other funds that have acquired portfolios include Aiqon, Lindorff, Cerberus and Starwood.

Original story: Expansión (by S. Saborit and J. Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake