Voyager: Sabadell Launches Sale Of €1,000M NPL Portfolio

2 August 2017 – Expansión

Banco Sabadell is accelerating the sale of the non-performing assets accumulated on its balance sheet during the crisis. In just three years, the entity chaired by Josep Oliu has managed to cut its doubtful loan balance in half, which means that it has divested non-performing loans amounting to almost €9,000 million since 2014. In this way, in June of that year, the bank held €17,386 million in problem assets on its balance sheet, compared to the current figure of €8,541 million, according to the accounts published last Friday.

This effort has been made possible by the fact that Sabadell has been one of the most active entities in the sale of debt portfolios in recent years (…). In the last few months alone, it has managed to divest almost €2,000 million through the sale of Projects Normandy and Gregal (…). In addition, the bank has just engaged Deloitte to sound out the market as to whether an appetite exists for another €1,000 million portfolio, known as Voyager.

Gregal and Normandy

Project Gregal contained non-performing loans amounting to around €800 million and was segmented into three sub-portfolios. The last one was sold this week to the fund Grove Capital Management, which has taken over a batch of doubtful loans granted to SMEs. The other two Gregal packages were awarded to D.E. Shaw and Lindorff (…).

On the other hand, at the end of July, the bank managed to definitively close the sale of the Normandy portfolio (€950 million) to Oaktree. That portfolio comprised loans linked to real estate developments and so the amount paid was much higher and is reported to have amounted to around €300 million, which would represent a discount of around 70% (…).

Original story: Expansión (by Sergi Saborit)

Translation: Carmel Drake