Bain Capital

The National Bank of Greece Group on Friday announced the completion of a transaction for the disposal of a nonperforming, predominantly secured, corporate loan portfolio to the investment firm Bain Capital Credit for a total principal amount of 1.6 billion euros.

National Bank of Greece (NBG) announced on Tuesday that it had entered into a definite agreement with Bain Capital Credit for the sale of a Romanian-risk corporate nonperforming exposures portfolio ("Project Danube") with a total gross book value of around 174 million euros.

Greece's Alpha Bank is in talks with at least five US investment firms including Cerberus and PIMCO in a fresh attempt to offload a portfolio of bad debt worth more than 10 billion euros ($11.3 billion), two sources told Reuters.

Over 20,000 properties of all types are expected to come on the market in the coming years, either through direct sales or auctions, with an obvious impact on prices.

Alpha Bank is awaiting binding offers from three short-listed investors for the concession of its nonperforming corporate loan portfolio dubbed "Neptune," testing investor interest in the largest portfolio of secured corporate loans put up for sale by a Greek lender to date.

Properties worth hundreds of millions of euros are expected to come on the market in the next few months as banks and the investments funds that have acquired portfolios of loans secured against property assets are picking up the pace in this process to make the most of improving conditions and institutional investors' appetites for more and larger properties, so as to secure higher prices.

Forty major foreign investment firms and 30 Greek business groups will be meeting in Athens on September 20 in a roundtable to discuss investment projects that could be implemented in the near term.

The tender for the sale of the first batch of properties formerly used as collateral for loans has attracted a very high degree of interest from domestic and foreign investors alike, including real estate investment firms and investment funds.

Eurobank has received a nonbinding offer for its Financial Planning Services (FPS) unit from a consortium comprising US funds Elliott and Bain Capital and Italian credit manager Cerved, banking sources close to the process said.
FPS will be sold as part of a planned 7.5-billion-euro multi-asset securitization package by Eurobank, code-named Cairo.

The managing officers of real estate investment companies as well as foreign funds exploring the Greek market in search of opportunities have their eyes fixed on the real estate assets in the portfolios of secured nonperforming loans that were sold last year.