Bank of Cyprus offloading EUR 2.8bn nonperforming loan portfolio

(Sharecast News) - Bank of Cyprus Holdings has reached an agreement for the sale of a portfolio of loans with a gross book value of €2.8bn secured by real estate collateral, it announced on Tuesday.The London-listed company said the portfolio would be transferred to a licensed Cypriot credit acquiring company by Bank of Cyprus.It said the shares of the credit acquiring company would then be acquired by certain funds affiliated with Apollo Global Management, the purchaser of the portfolio.Funds managed by Apollo would provide equity capital in relation to the financing of the purchase of the portfolio, with the purchaser having been selected following a competitive sale process.Bank of Cyprus said the portfolio had a contractual balance of €5.7 bn.The net book value of the assets being sold as at 30 June amounted to €1.5 bn before the impact of the transaction on the second quarter income statement.At completion, the bank would receive gross cash consideration of €1.4bn.The portfolio comprised 14,024 loans to corporate and small-to-medium enterprise borrowers, secured over 9,065 properties.Bank of Cyprus said the completion of the transaction remained subject to a number of conditions precedent, including mainly regulatory and other approvals, including the ECB agreeing to a significant risk transfer benefit from the transaction.The bank said it intended to participate in the senior debt in relation to such financing in an amount of €450m, subject to regulatory approval.Following a transitional period where servicing would be retained by the bank, it said it intended that the servicing of the portfolio would be carried out by a long-term servicer.Arrangements in relation to the migration of servicing from the bank to the long-term servicer, including the timing of the migration, remained under discussion between the parties.The transaction accelerated the bank's strategy of de-risking its balance sheet, the board explained, resulting in a non-performing exposure ratio improvement of around 10 percentage points.It said the deconsolidation of the portfolio from the bank's balance sheet was expected to have a positive impact on its capital ratios of around 60 basis points.The accounting loss attributable to the transaction reported in the second quarter was estimated at €135m, declining to €105m by year-end, as time value of money of.€30m unwound.Bank of Cyprus said the transaction was the first nonperforming loans disposal it had made, and represented a "significant milestone" in the delivery of its strategy of improving asset quality."This is a transformative sale for the bank and is the first meaningful corporate and SME NPL trade in Cyprus," said group chief executive John Patrick Hourican."Since 2014, we have focused on decreasing our stock of NPLs and improving the asset quality of the bank, and today's transaction is a significant step forward on our journey of de-risking the balance sheet and enhancing our capital position."There is of course much more work to be done and we remain as focused as ever on continuing to seek solutions, both organic and inorganic, to further improve the Bank's asset quality position."