Banco Santander wants to recover its Financial City. The group chaired by Ana Botín has submitted an offer to repurchase it for around 2,500 million euros to Madrid Commercial Court number 9, the court that manages the liquidation of Marme Inversiones, the firm that has owned the bank’s executive headquarters for ten years . Santander sold the Financial City in the midst of the economic crisis to the British consortium Propinves, owner of Marme. Three years later, the firm was unable to assume its debts and went into liquidation.
Last week, the Court set a deadline for Monday, September 17, to submit bids for the venue. In addition to the entity, the Kuwaiti fund AGC and the Asian Sorlinda are also bidding for the Financial City, according to sources close to the operation. Finally, Blackstone, last week a joint offer with the Centerbridge fund for 3,000 million euros, has fallen out of the auction.
Santander sold the Financial City for 1,900 million euros (obtaining capital gains of 605 million) to later rent it to the buyer for 40 years for 82 million euros per year. The bank had the right of first refusal for the headquarters at the time it went on sale. At present, Marme has about 500 million euros in cash from the income that it has been receiving from Santander, liquidity that the bidders have taken into account when presenting the offers. The Court has given a period of two weeks for the three bidders to raise their bet and, after this, it is expected that the operation will be closed in a period of another fifteen days.
The Financial City, located in the Madrid municipality of Boadilla del Monte and 30 kilometers from the capital, occupies an area of 250 hectares. Inside, it houses nine buildings that house the more than 4,000 workers of the bank’s central services.
‘Brick’ cleaning
The entity continues to clean the brick of its balance sheet in Spain. Santander has sold a portfolio of real estate assets to the Cerberus fund. The gross value of the package was around 2,700 million euros, although the operation has been closed for 1,535 million euros. The portfolio is made up of 35,700 homes, garages and storage rooms, as reported by the Cantabrian group yesterday.
The bank put up for sale at the beginning of this summer a package of real estate assets valued at 5,000 million euros, which it has finally broken down into two. Thus, after the portfolio that it has placed in the investment fund made up solely of residential properties, the bank still maintains a second one for sale made up of commercial premises and valued at another 2,400 million euros. The placement of this last package would leave the balance of the entity in Spain practically clean of brick.
Banco Santander has once again repeated with Cerberus the same system that it already used with Blackstone to shake off Popular’s real estate assets. The entity and the fund will create a joint venture to which to transfer the brick.
However, the bank’s stake in the new company is still under negotiation, although it will fluctuate between 20 and 49%. The exact percentage of the shares in the company will be determined before the closing of the operation. The group expects the agreement to be fully completed by the end of this year or in the first quarter of 2019. The most similar operation to date is that of Blackstone and Popular, an agreement announced in August last year but closed in March of this year.
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