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  • Feb 28th, 2005
  • Comments Off on PNB sells $88 million assets to Bank of America consortium
Philippine National Bank (PNB), the country's fourth-largest listed private lender, said on Sunday it had sold 4.8 billion pesos ($88 million) of non-performing assets to a consortium of Bank of America Corp and Marathon Asset Management. PNB, owned by tobacco and airline tycoon Lucio Tan and the government, which has a minority stake, said the sale was part of its strategy for improving its balance sheet.

The sale, which attracted seven bids, was "a good indicator of the continued keen interest of international investors to participate in the country's distressed assets market", PNB President Lorenzo Tan said in a statement.

Local banks are rushing to unload bad assets - most of which went sour after the Asian financial crisis in 1997/1998 - to private investors or asset management firms before a special purpose asset vehicle law expires in April.

The law gives investors that buy local banks' bad assets incentives such as waived payments of certain taxes and reduced fees for asset transfers.

The influential Bankers Association of the Philippines, which groups more than 40 commercial banks, has asked Congress to extend the law for two years.

Latest central bank data shows bad loans at Philippine commercial banks slid to 12.72 percent of total loans at the end of December from 13.57 percent in November and 14.05 percent in December 2003 as banks sold a total of 16.38 billion pesos of non-performing loans (NPLs) last year.

PNB, which has the highest NPL ratio in the industry, said it wanted to bring down its bad loan portfolio to 24.3 billion pesos by year-end from 37.9 billion pesos at the end of 2004 and a peak of 53 billion before it entered into a rehabilitation programme in 2002 to nurse it back to financial health.

Copyright Reuters, 2005


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