Greece’s largest lender Piraeus Bank is seeking a buyer for a €1.5 bn non-performing loan portfolio in what is said to be the country’s first major property-backed sale by a local bank.
The portfolio, dubbed Project Amoeba, is a mix bag of secured and unsecured loans with a face value of €1.5 bn. The secured portion of the portfolio is backed by €450 mln worth of commercial, residential and industrial assets and is in addition to around €200 mln of unsecured loans, for a total representing 40% of the loans’ face value.
Preliminary bids are due by February 9, with interested parties said to comprise over 30 firms including Apollo Global Management, Davidson Kempner Capital Management, Oaktree Capital, the Blackstone Group, Cerberus Capital Management, Starwood Capital, KKR, TPG Capital, Lone Star, Centerbridge, Hoist, and Anacap Financial Partners.
PropertyEU's sister publication Europroperty first reported in September last year that Piraeus had hired UBS to prepare the disposal, which is due to close by the second quarter.
If successful the sale is expected to unleash a number of similar disposals by the Greek banks, which are saddled with some €100 bn of NPLs and are under growing regulatory pressure to tackle their bad-debt problem.
‘This is a pilot transaction,’ said Christoforos Stratos of Resolute Asset Management, a European specialist real estate asset management and non-performing loan servicing firm, commenting on Project Amoeba. ‘All the other banks will be looking at how it fares to understand the best way to package the next sale.’
Greece’s banks have been struggling to sell assets largely due to legal hurdles and the reluctance of the courts to take action under public pressure. In late 2017 Eurobank launched the country’s first major sale of bad unsecured loans, divesting a consumer loan portfolio with a face value of €1.5 bn. Alpha Bank, Piraeus Bank and the National Bank followed suit, shedding similar consumer loan portfolios and recovering an average of 3 cents on the dollar per each package.
