Alpha Bank agrees sale of bad loan portfolio to Hoist Finance

A man withdraws money at an Alpha Bank branch ATM in central Athens, Greece, July 19, 2015. REUTERS/Yiannis Kourtoglou

ATHENS, Dec 28 (Reuters) – Alpha Bank (ACBr.AT), one of Greece’s four biggest lenders, said on Tuesday it entered into a binding agreement with Hoist Finance AB to sell non-performing loans with a book value of 1.3 billion euros ($1.47 billion).

The Orbit portfolio relates to retail unsecured non-performing loans with the sale expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2022, the bank said in a news release.

“The transaction has been agreed at 108 million euros or 7.4% of total unpaid principal balance,”, the bank said.

Greek banks have been working to reduce a pile of about 30 billion euros in bad loans, the legacy of a decade-long financial crisis which shrank Greece’s output by a quarter.

The transaction is the third after the securitisation of Galaxy and Cosmos portfolios. It is expected to reduce Alpha Bank’s non-performing exposures by 2.3 percentage points.

($1 = 0.8841 euros)

Reporting by Lefteris Papadimas; editing by Jason Neely

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