Novobanco attempts to offload €37M hotel debt

Novobanco is to again attempt to sell the €37 million debt attached to a hotel in Figueira da Foz which has been nicknamed the ‘Titanic’ because of its shape.

The hotel Eurostars Oasis Plaza was to be one of the assets to be sold in the bank’s NPL portfolio Project Harvey, but the Resolution Fund, which had been pumping cash into the bank to keep it afloat over the past 8 years, did not allow the sale to proceed and the hotel is up for grabs again.
According to the online news service ECO, it is not the first time that the bank led by Mark Bourke has tried to offload the debt which is guaranteed by the hotel which was developed and is owned by the Plaza Oasis Group with Angolan capital, and is currently being explored by the Spanish hotel group Hotusa that has around 24 hotels in Portugal.
The €37 million was one of the loans included in Project Harvey which contains some big ticket debtors to the bank like builder José Guilherme of the Lena Group (Now Novo Group). The debt was about to be sold to equity and asset management groups Deva and Arrow but was not concluded after the Resolution Fund stopped the sale going through at the 11th hour, probably because it felt it was undervalued.
The bank is now trying to sell the debts via various single names portfolios with various individual operations in the market such as Heliportugal (€100 million) and Farmácias GAP (€16.7 million).
Neither the bank nor Oasis Plaza have responded to questions about the blocked sale by the time that the article went to publication.