Alpha Bank receives two bids for bad debt portfolio
Alpha Bank, Greece’s fourth largest lender, said on Monday it had received two binding bids for the sale of a bad loan portfolio worth about 10.6 billion euros ($12.35 billion).
The transaction will involve a securitiζation and also the sale of the bank’s loan servicing platform Cepal.
The portfolio, known as Galaxy, consists of retail loans worth 7.6 billion euros plus loans to medium-sized and large corporate clients worth 3 billion euros.
The bank did not disclose further details.
Greek banks have been struggling to reduce a pile of bad loans worth about 60 billion euros, the legacy of a decade-long financial crisis that shrank the country’s economy by a quarter.
Alpha Bank, which is 11% owned by Greece’s bank rescue fund HFSF, wants to reduce its bad loan ratio to 13% of its total loan book.
It reported profit of 97.5 million euros in the second quarter of the year while its non-performing loans stood at 30.2%.
[Reuters]
