Today it will be a D-day for the future of Italy’s payment services bank Istituto Centrale delle Banche Popolari (Icbpi). Icbpi’s shareholders are actually going to meet in Milan in order to evaluate, together with advisors Mediobanca and Equita sim, the very final offers for the whole capital of the bank, MF-Milano Finanza writes today (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
Credito Valtellinese (Creval) is the major shareholder in Icbpi with a 20.4% stake, followed by other Italy’s cooperative banks Banco Popolare (16%), Banca Popolare di Vicenza and Veneto Banca (about 10% each) and Banca Popolare dell’Emilia Romagna (8.7%).
Final bidders are just private equity firms. More in detail they are: a consortium made by US private equity firms Advent and Bain Capital together with Italy’s Clessidra; and paneuropean operator Permira allied with CVC Capital Partners. BC Partners and with Cinven are instead said to be out of the race as they put out a bid for the Carta Sì business only.
Last Friday the CVC-Permiras consortium has been told he won right to exclusive talks on the deal but few hours later there was a counter-order, MF-Milano Finanza writes. The facts are that CVC-Permira are said to evaluate Icbpi 2.05 billion euros and are ready to finance the with equity for an 85% stake and debt just for the remaining 15%. This is a solution which is seen quite well by the sellers as it assures a quite strong financial structure to Icbpi after the deal.
However, the Bain-Advent-Permira consortium evaluate Icbpi 2.12 billion euros, which is a higher price that Icbpi would like better. But the problem is that these private equity funds offered to finance the deal half by equity and half by debt. And a one billion euro debt is not seen so healthy be the sellers in comparrison to Icbpi’s operative income of 167.7 million euros in 2014.
So Icbpi’s advisors asked CVC-Permira to bid with an higher price and asked Bain-Advent-Clessidra to finance the deal with a lower debt. Today the two consortiums will bring their new bids on the desk of Icbpi’s shareholders.
