Royal Bank of Scotland has agreed to sell a £1.6bn portfolio of property loans to a company managed by Blackstone in a key deal for the property and banking markets.
RBS has picked Blackstone for the loan portfolio, in a process codenamed Project Isobel, ahead of Lone Star, Starwood Capital and Westbrook Partners.
If a purchase reaches completion without a hitch, it could form a prospective template for similar sales of loans by banks, and thus help lenders rid themselves of problem legacy loans and allow them to lend again.
The portfolio comprises whole loans and portions of syndicated loans with a face value of £1.6bn that are both performing and non-performing. It is thought that the price set to be paid for the loans is around £1.1bn – a discount of around 30%.
The sale of this portfolio will not net the winning party stratospheric returns but will open the door to other deals with RBS
Part of the reason why the sale has taken so long to come to a conclusion is because RBS and its advisers, Lazard and Berwin Leighton Paisner, have been fine-tuning the structure to ensure the bank takes the smallest possible writedown.
No comments:
Post a Comment