The ongoing disaster that is Novo Banco of Portugal

A constant theme of this website is an ongoing consequence of the credit crunch where more than a few banks have not been reformed and are still damaged goods. They are banks which were somewhat presciently sung about by the Cranberries.

Zombie, zombie, zombie

Certainly in that list was Banco Espirito Santo of Portugal which found itself in a spider’s web of corruption and bad loans. This led to this being announced by the Bank of Portugal in August 2014.

The Board of Directors of Banco de Portugal has decided on 3 August 2014 to apply a resolution measure to Banco Espírito Santo, S.A.. The general activity and assets of Banco Espírito Santo, S.A. are transferred, immediately and definitively, to Novo Banco, which is duly capitalised and clean of problem assets.

The point of this was supposed to be that Novo Banco would then be like its name, a New Bank. It would be clean of the past problems and would then thrive and the bad bank elements would be removed. Reuters took up the story.

Novo Banco, or New Bank – will be recapitalised to the tune of 4.9 billion euros by a special bank resolution fund created in 2012. The Portuguese state will lend the fund 4.4 billion euros.

At the time there were various issues as Portugal itself had only recently departed an IMF bailout so was not keen to explicitly bailout BES. Thus the bank resolution fund was used except of course it had nowhere near enough money so the state lent it most of it. These sort of Special Purpose vehicles are invariably employed to try to keep the debt out of the national debt. To be fair to Eurostat that usually does not work but left an awkward situation going forwards where in theory the other Portuguese banks created Novo Banco but in reality the Portuguese taxpayer provided most of the cash.

Novo Banco

As regular readers will be aware investors in Novo Banco later discovered that the word “clean” was a relative and not an absolute term.

The nominal amount of the bonds retransferred to Banco Espírito Santo, S.A. totals 1,941 million euros and corresponds to a balance-sheet amount of 1,985 million euros………This measure has a positive impact, in net terms, on the equity of Novo Banco of approximately 1,985 million euros.

This may have happened just after Christmas 2015 but there was no present here for the holders of these bonds who found them worth zero. To say that institutional investors were unhappy would be an understatement and I will return to this later but for now I just wish to point out that the bill is escalating and also how can a clean new bank have to do this?

The sale of Novo Banco

There were various efforts to sell Novo Banco which went nowhere and of course trust in the Bank of Portugal was damaged by what happened above which added to the misrepresentations issued by it as BES declined. Just over a year ago it published this.

Banco de Portugal has defined the terms of the new sale process of Novo Banco, following the re-launch announced on 15 January 2016.

This January the Lex Column of the Financial Times pointed out why buyers have been in short supply.

Available for purchase: one crippled bank suffering from poor credit quality and high costs. Location: Portugal. Important information: Potential for future damages arising from litigious creditors. The sale prospectus for Novo Banco does not look enticing.

It gets worse.

Quarterly losses since Novo’s creation have averaged €250m. A quarter of all loans are delinquent or “at risk” of being so.

Again we are left wondering exactly how the Bank of Portugal defines the word “clean”?! But whilst the FT thought there were bidders it looks to me that the only player was the appropriately named Lone Star.

Lone Star

What happened late on Friday was summarised by Patricia Kowsman of the Wall Street Journal.

Dallas-based Lone Star will inject €1 billion ($1.07 billion) in Novo Banco for a 75% stake, while a resolution fund supported by the system’s banks will hold the remainder. The setup could ultimately leave Portuguese taxpayers exposed to losses, which is what the country’s central bank had tried to avoid when it imposed a resolution on the lender almost three years ago.

Actually they are only paying 750 million Euros up front with the rest by 2020. But as we number crunch this there are a lot of problems.

1. The nearly 2 billion Euros of bonds written off do not seem to have made the situation much better.
2. The Portuguese Resolution Fund put in 4.9 billion Euros for a bank which is now apparently worth 1 and 1/3 billion.

The Resolution Fund took steps last September to cover this.

the maturity date of the loan will be adjusted so as to ensure that it will not be necessary to raise special contributions,

I would like to take you back to August 2014 when it told us this.

Therefore this operation will eventually involve no costs for public funds………..This applies even in exceptional cases, such as this one, in which the State is called upon to provide temporary financial support to the Resolution Fund, as that support will later be repaid (and remunerated through payment of interest) by the Fund.

The use of the word “temporary” was a warning as its official use is invariably the complete opposite of that to be found in a dictionary. Also I am reminded of my time line for a banking collapse.

5. The relevant government(s) tell us that they are stepping in to help the bank but the problems are both minor and short-term and are of no public concern.

6. The relevant government(s) tell us that the bank needs taxpayer support but through clever use of special purpose vehicles there will be no cost and indeed a profit is virtually certain.

Back in August 2014 we were told this. From Reuters.

“The plan carries no risk to public finances or taxpayers,” Carlos Costa, the central bank governor, told reporters in a late night news conference in Lisbon.

Litigation

You might think that things could not get much worse. Yet apparently they continue to do so. From Reuters.

Blackrock and other asset management institutions are seeking an injunction this week to block the sale of Portugal’s Novo Banco to U.S. private equity firm Lone Star.

Okay why?

The bond transfer had caused losses of about 1.5 billion for ordinary retail investors and pensioners

Comment

A critique of the banking bailouts has been the phrase “privatisation of profits and socialisation of losses ” and we see this at play here. Whilst there is a veil of a Special Purpose Vehicle ( the Resolution Fund) the Portuguese taxpayer has had to borrow money to back most of it. It is plain that we were not told the truth or anything remotely like the truth when a “clean” bank was created. As no cash at all has been returned from the sale of Novo Banco – the funds are to boost bank capital – they are left hoping that one day the money will be repaid except they have been diluted by a factor of four.

Let us take a happy scenario where Novo Banco now does well the majority of the gains will go to Lone Star and a minority to the Resolution Fund. So the minor stakeholder gets the majority of the returns? Oh and even worse the Fund is backing another sector of potential losses. From the Algarve Daily News.

In a statement issued today, PS party leader Carlos César says MPs “should know in detail all the preparatory and contractual aspects of the sale operation” – bearing in mind the State has no say in the bank’s management, but is guaranteeing to underwrite extraordinary losses of up to €4 billion.

In a happy scenario the other Portuguese banks will be likely to be able to put some extra money into the Resolution Fund but of course many of them have their own problems and the Portuguese economy could do with them backing it.

And a bad scenario? Well look at the sums above……..