Three US funds have put a joint offer of 200 million euros for the bad real estate debt of Cajamar, our local bank.
TPG, Apollo & JC Flowers have joined forces to table the offer, which looks likely to be accepted, according to Expansion newspaper.
Cajamar setup a real estate asset management company called Cimenta2, which attempts to sell all their embargoed property. It also manages a vast amount of outstanding credits, or bad debt.
By offloading this bad debt to a third company, Cajamar artificially bolsters its core assets, raising its credit level.
Of course, if they can actually sell this bad debt to a specialised company, in exchange for cash, that’s even better.
Although, isn’t that what caused the crash in the first place?
Let’s see the terms of the sale… my guess is that it’s not going to be straight cash, but some kind of deal where the bank gets cash, but then gives a guarantees to the buyer.
So basically the bank pretends to sell the debt, and JC Flowers & Co gets bribed to pretend to buy it.
Offloading debt is fine, but pretending to offload it to make your capital ratios look good (and taking a cash loss).