Axactor & Grove Compete to Acquire Sareb’s Largest NPL Portfolio

23 July 2018 – Voz Pópuli

The Norwegian investment fund Axactor and the US fund Grove, which is in the process of merging with the British firm Cabot, are competing to be awarded a non-performing loan portfolio with a nominal value of €2.335 billion by Sareb. The portfolio is the largest of its kind to be sold by the company chaired by Jaime Echegoyen (pictured below), according to financial sources consulted by Vozpópuli.

Sareb has recently received binding offers from the two aforementioned funds, as well as from Kruk, a Polish company specialising in debt recovery. Nevertheless, the proposal made by the latter was well below those submitted by the other two. According to the sources consulted, the Norwegian fund, which recently acquired a €900 million portfolio from Sabadell, as this newspaper revealed, looks to be the favourite to win the auction this time around.

The portfolio in question, which forms part of Project Dune, regarding which Sareb is being advised by KPMG, comprises unsecured non-performing loans. In fact, the assets are mortgage tails – loans that have not been repaid following the execution of their corresponding mortgage contracts – from small- and medium-sized property developers.

In this specific operation, the offers that the interested parties have presented reflect significant discounts, which may even amount to 99% of the nominal value of the portfolio, with the aim of trying to recover the maximum possible amount of the debt, which is no longer secured by any collateral.

Gains

In any case, whatever Sareb obtains for this portfolio will represent a gain for the entity, given that all of the loans, which are considered almost irrecoverable, have already been fully provisioned. The completion of the operation will happen in the month of September, at the earliest, according to the sources consulted.

Last week, Sareb shelved the block sale of between €20 billion and €30 billion in real estate assets due to the high cost of the operation. In fact, the Board of Directors of the entity known as the bad bank decided not to undertake that operation for the time being, due to the capital hole that the sale of those assets would have generated for the acquiring fund, which require higher discounts than individual investors.

That deal was called Project Alpha and Goldman Sachs had been working on it for months, to determine how, when and to whom the portfolio could be sold. Sareb was also supported in that deal by the consultancy firm CBRE and the audit firm EY (…).

Original story: Voz Pópuli (by Pepe Bravo)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Project Sintra: BBVA Engages PwC to Sell €1bn of Toxic Loans

13 March 2018 – Voz Pópuli

BBVA does not want to waste any more time on the real estate clean-up exercise. In the last few days, the entity chaired by Francisco González has launched a €1 billion portfolio on the market: Project Sintra, according to financial sources consulted by Vozpópuli. It is being advised in the operation by PwC. Neither the bank nor the consultancy firm wanted to comment.

This portfolio is the penultimate step for BBVA in the reduction of its real estate exposure to zero, after the agreement it reached with Cerberus to transfer €13 billion of foreclosed assets, as this newspaper revealed. That sale, Project Marina, is still pending the necessary authorisations and is scheduled to be closed in the middle of this year.

The balance of BBVA’s divestments is as follows: before Project Marina, the entity had a gross exposure (not including provisions) of almost €16 billion, which will end up at just over €3 billion. Of that figure, two-thirds relate to unpaid loans linked to land and completed developments, with a coverage ratio of 54%.

With this new operation, BBVA wants to be crowned as the first major entity to get rid of its inheritance from the crisis. Last year, Santander closed the sale of €30 billion from Popular to Blackstone, but it still has €11.7 billion left to divest.

The same stars

With Project Sintra, BBVA has now awarded the mandate for three consecutive operations to PwC. It did so with Project Jaipur, worth €600 million, which was acquired by Cerberus; and Project Marina, which had the same advisor and buyer.

The latter operation generated unease amongst certain funds, which complained to the bank because it had not opened a competitive process, but instead chose to negotiate one on one with Cerberus. Sources close to that operation defended that a bilateral sale could optimise both the price and an auction, thanks to the threat of opening the process to more rivals.

In this way, BBVA is one of the entities that has decided to accelerate the sale of portfolios during the first quarter, like Sareb, which is finalising the sale of between three and four packages: Nora, Bidasoa, Dune and Slap, with a combined volume of €3.2 billion.

One of the most fashionable assets and one that entities are increasingly including in their portfolios is land. In this way, Sareb is preparing an operation containing land only and Kutxabank is evaluating a similar process.

Original story: Voz Pópuli (by Jorge Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Sareb Puts 4 Large Portfolios Worth €3.2bn Up For Sale

12 March 2018 – Eje Prime

Sareb is in a hurry. The bad bank has put four large portfolios of assets up for sale worth €3.2 billion, in a move that sees the company getting ahead of the significant divestments that many of the large Spanish banks are planning to undertake.

Moreover, the company that manages assets inherited from the banks would be willing to add two campaigns to this divestment plan through the loan channel worth €1.25 billion and which, in addition to the portfolios that are coming onto the market, would allow Sareb to place up to €4.5 billion in assets.

Of the projects that it has brought onto the market, the bad bank highlights Dune. Through that operation, whose sale was thwarted in 2017, Sareb is putting up for sale €2.5 billion in mortgage debt, in other words, unpaid loans following the enforcement of real estate loans, according to Vózpopuli.

Two other asset portfolios that the bad bank is seeking to market are Project Nora and Project Bidasoa. The first comprises unpaid loans over residential homes for a value that ranges between €300 million and €400 million. Meanwhile, Bidasoa is a debt linked to land located all over Spain that, in total, amounts to €300 million.

Sources at Sareb, which declined to make any comment in this regard, only point out that the sales made during the first few months of 2018 relate to the company’s plan to “deseasonalise” its activity.

Original story: Eje Prime

Translation: Carmel Drake

Sareb Puts Spain’s Largest Ever NPL Portfolio Up For Sale

7 November 2017 – Voz Pópuli

Sareb wants to star in the largest sale to date of non-performing loans in Spain. The company chaired by Jaime Echegoyen has put a portfolio of unpaid loans worth €2,600 million up for sale, according to financial sources consulted by Vozpópuli. It hopes to sell the portfolio before the end of the year and since it contains NPLs that are recognised off-balance sheet, all of the consideration paid will correspond to profits.

This operation has been baptised as Project Dune and is being advised by KPMG. Until now, the largest sale of an unsecured non-performing loan portfolio was completed by BBVA in 2014, when it sold a portfolio worth €1,700 million to Deutsche Bank.

Non-performing loans are credits that have been written off by the banks, which remove them from their balance sheets after recognising 100% provisions against them. In the case of Sareb, they are what is known in the market as mortgage tails: essentially, they are loans that remained uncollected following the execution of a real estate loan. These loans are purchased by opportunistic funds at significant discounts, of between 95% and 97%, which try to recover the maximum amount by taking the debtors to court. Since they are fully provisioned, the entire amount that Sareb receives from this sale will be recognised as profits.

Project Dune actually comprises two sub-portfolios: Pilat, containing 2,261 unsecured non-performing loans to 1,500 small- and medium-sized property developers, worth €2,442 million; and Kirbus, containing 115 loans secured by real estate, with a combined nominal value of €176 million.

In this way, the second sub-portfolio has almost 1,000 properties as collateral, of which around half are apartments, located primarily in Barcelona, A Corñua and Madrid. Half of the Dune portfolio is located in Cataluña, the Community of Valencia and Aragón.

On the basis of the prices that tend to be paid in this market, Sareb could end up generating revenues/gross profits of between €125 million and €175 million from this sale, depending on the degree of interest that the portfolio sparks amongst the funds and the level of competition between them.

Project Dune is not the only deal that Sareb has underway since it also has other portfolios worth more than €1,000 million on the market. The largest process currently in progress is known as Project Inés, containing €400 million, whose purchase is being finalised by Deutsche Bank. The bad bank typically uses these types of operations towards the end of the year to balance its budget and generate higher revenues to allow it to pay off some of its debt.

This sale is being coordinated by the prestigious portfolio team at KPMG, led by Carlos Rubí. Most of the team came from PwC and joined the firm in 2014.

Original story: Voz Pópuli (by Jorge Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake