Stock da Cunha and Sérgio Monteiro will be in New York next week to start the Novo Banco sale roadshow.
BES collapsed 18 months ago and the sale of Novo Banco, stripped of much of its inconvenient debt, will kick off on March 31st.
The New York meetings are in order to find investors that are interested in Novo Banco.
This is a misreading of the mood on Wall Street that any bank which removes €1.8 billion of bonds to the detriment of investors is part of a Portuguese system that has thrown regulation to the wind, lacks a central bank that knows what it is doing and is a dangerous place in which to risk capital.
After New York, the next stop is London between April 4th and 5th then it’s an expensive publicly funded trip back to New York and on April 7th the unlikely pair will go to Boston, Mass.
The idea of this trip is to bring together 30 to 40 large investors so as to present them with Novo Banco’s current loss making situation and the plans laid by the bank’s board led by Eduardo Stock da Cunha.
Financial giant Goldman Sachs is unlikely to be among the suitors as it has lost hundreds of millions in the BES collapse and subsequent bond shuffle.
The likleyhood is that other institutions will view Novo Banco as at best 'speculative' and at worst, a bank in a discreditied system where the regulator bahaves erratically.
Sérgio Monteiro, on €25,000 a month for his expertise, was been appointed by the Resolution Fund to sell the business. The pair will be travelling with two Novo Banco directors, Francisco Cary and Jorge Cardoso.
Sérgio Monteiro’s has the idea that before July he will agree a sale of the bank in a closed sale open only to institutional investors.
Last time the bank negotiated with interested parties, in the late summer of 2015, the talks collapsed as the two Chinese businesses came nowhere near the €4.9 billion needed to restore the Bank of Portugal’s credibility and leave taxpayers at least at break even.
China is not on the list of venues to be visited despite the government's continuing star-struck attitude and cosying up to any country that has more money that itself.
Comments
Currently oddly on the radar as its soon to be discussed in Brussels, so unavoidable, is the more recent BANIF collapse and fire sale and the ignorant peasants being told it has added a loss of 1.4% to the Portuguese Government borrowing deficit. Making it 4.4%.
Yet sitting in the background is this much larger loss - the BES collapse and failed firesale.