Local cooperative bank Cajamar has rolled up some 400 million euros in bad loans into one big package and has sold them for seven and a half million euros in cash to Haya Real Estate, a mainly US backed investment vehicle.
This is the second big operation with that company for the bank, after it sold Haya its real estate platform “Cimenta2” for 225 million euros last year.
The loans in question were all granted to private individuals and companies over the last decade and although they have not been written off by the bank, they are all considered to be extremely high risk and too difficult and expensive for Cajamar to pursue. Haya hopes that its experience in specialist debt collection will allow it to extract sufficient value from the bad loans to cover their purchase cost, and by buying the loans from the bank Haya is now technically the owner of all these loans.
Cajamar has to take a write-down for the value of these loans against its asset book, but no longer has to worry about declaring them under EU banking laws.