In a further sweep of the distressed loan market in Europe, US private equity firm Cerberus Global Investors has acquired £625 mln (€790 mln) of mainly non-performing UK property loans from National Australia Bank.
In a further sweep of the distressed loan market in Europe, US private equity firm Cerberus Global Investors has acquired £625 mln (€790 mln) of mainly non-performing UK property loans from National Australia Bank.
The sale will result in a small gain above the loans’ net book value and yield about £127 mln of capital for the bank when it settles, NAB said in a regulatory filing on Monday. It will shrink the gross loan balance of the bank’s UK commercial property portfolio by 20% to £2.38 bn, the bank said.
NAB Group CEO Andrew Thorburn said the sale marked a ‘substantial de-risking’ of the non-performing part of the lender's UK portfolio.
The bank had been mulling a sale of its UK loan portfolio for several months after announcing its intention to permanently exit the UK commercial property lending market two years ago.
Cerberus has been storming the market for distressed loans in Europe since the beginning of the year, often in competition with US rivals Lone Star and Blackstone. It has bought substantial loan packages in the UK and Ireland, the largest of which was the acquisition in June of the £4.5 bn (€5.6 bn) Eagle loan portfolio from Ireland's bad bank National Asset Management Agency (NAMA).