Distressed debt investors are looking to buy shipping loans from Italian banks, loaded with over 200 billion euros of Npls which grow to over 330 billions when considering past-due accounts, debts in excess of limits, restructured debts and other bad debts.
Investors said to be the most active are York Capital, Oaktree, Attestor Capital, Davidson Kempner, Wayzata, Tufton Oceanic, Centerbridge, Cerberus Capital Management and Z Capital. MF Milano Finanza writes today, quoting all well known names in the sector (see here a previous post by BeBeez and Reuters).
However the news is that Deutsche Bank too is entering this sector in Italy, after having bought last July a portfolio of shipping bad loans from Rbs in joint venture with Apollo Global Management: the portfolio was bought for 400 million pounds but its gross value was 1.14 billions (see Reuters here).
Deutsche Bank is actually said to have bought recently in Italy two distressed shipping loans: a 38 million dollars loan from Banco Popolare financing the acquisition of a ship by Rbd Armatori and a 90 million dollars loan from Commerzbank financing the acquisition of four ships by Gestioni Armatoriali.
A similar deal was signed last year by Goldman Sachs who acquired a loan portfolio valued 206 million dollars from Unicredit and Ge Capital financing ships acquisitions by Rbd Armatori.
Since about one year ago in Italy 21 debt restructuring debt processes had been opened by ship owners in Italy for a total bank debt of about 13 billion dollars of which 5 billions were Npls. In the last year some debt restructuring processes have been closed such as the one by Giuseppe Bottiglieri Shipping Company, Gruppo CaFiMa and Mednav. But there is still a lot of distressed debt to be restructured and/or sold.
