Apollo Global Management and Lonestar are said to be working hard to buy the real estate portfolio once belonging to Banca Popolare di Vicenza, the distressed bank which was rescued last year by Intesa Sanpaolo together with Veneto Banca, while Intesa did not buy those banks’ non performing exposures and some other non core assets such as real estate.
So while the auction for Popolare Vicenza’s real estate assets was started last Spring with many potential investors looking at the deal (such as Allianz, Invesco, Hines, Blackstone, Cerberus, TPG, Starwood Capital, Tristan, Apollo and Lone Star) now MF Milano Finanza writes that Apollo and Lonestar remained as the two more probable investors.
The real estate portfolio is owned by the banks’ subsidiary Immobiliare Stampa scpa and includes many trophy assets such as the bank’s headquarters in Milan and Rome and above all Palazzo di Thiene, the bank’s headquarter in Vicenza. In FY 2016’s financial statement the bank wrote that Immobiliare Stampa’s Nav was 204,6 million euros while its real estate portfolio is today valued around 400 million euros.
The portfolio does not include the historical Hotel San Marco in Cortina, which is going to be sold in a separate auction for about 8 million euros. The hotel was bought for a 12 million euros price by Anpezo srl, a company owned by the Catterlan family and by  Giorgio Spanio, both very good clients of the bank at that time. As far as Corriere della Sera wrote in 2017, the hotel was bought and restructured in 2011 thanks to a 20 million euros financing by Pop Vicenza on the basis of a 18 million euros valutation for the hotel that would be raised to 30 millions after refurbishment. In 2012 the banks gave 20 million euros more in loans to Anpezo, even if the company had about 0.75 million euros unpaid installments and in 2013 bought a stake in the real estate company owner of the hotel from the Cattelan family.
In the meantime a second auction for the sale of Farbanca, a bank specialized in financing pharmacies, is proceding. A first auction for Farbanca had been actually won last year by New Seres Apennines, an investment veichle owned by Chinese CEFC China Energy Company (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
However the deal was never finalized due to some CEFC difficulties so Farbanca was again put on the market (see here the press release). Among subjects that year was running for the bank there were  Banca Ifis and Credito Valtellinese and some private equity funds such as Blue Skye and Atlas (see here as previous post by BeBeez). Since then however banca Ifis had bought Credifarma, another bank active in that specific market.
