NB to sell Spanish arm in Q1

Novo Banco says it will sell off its Novo Banco Espanhã banking interests in Spain by March this year.

According to El Confidencial a lack of interested parties in the purchase of its Spanish operations has delayed the sale whose initial deadline expired on 31 December but has now been extended for three months.
The sale process has been dragging on since the second half of 2020 and has already caused one resignation.
Moreover, the lack of interested parties in the purchase has set the sale operation back, the initial deadline for sale completion being 31 December 2020.
Carlos Carrasco, in practice the third most important figure at the bank in Spain, behind the general director António Taquenho and deputy general director, Jorge Cabranes, will leave the bank on 30 January after having spent eight fruitless months trying to find a buyer for the bank’s Spanish operations.
The US fund that manages the bank, Lone Star, has yet to decide if it will sell Novo Banco lock, stock and barrel or try and split the bank up and sell it off in activity segments.
In December, the Spanish asset management entity managing Novo Banco in Spain, Novo Activos Financeiros España (NAFE), was sold to Trea Asset Management for close to €13 million.
At the end of May last year, the same Spanish newspaper advanced that Lone Star had decided to sell the bank’s operations in Spain, which involves the bank’s institutional, company, private and retail arms which at that time generated a total business turnover of €6Bn.
But a lack of interested parties pushed the possible sale price down. In June, the Spanish media outlet Expansión reported that the possible sale would be for less than €100 million. According to the newspaper which quoted sources at Deutsche Bank, the business had initially attracted a limited number of interested parties.