Foreign funds buy out non-performing loans worth RSD 94 billion from banks

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An Austrian bank sold the first block of loans, worth EUR 23.5 million, to APS Holding, a Prague fund. These were the loans granted to owners of 85 companies in the past 30 years, which had been inherited from the bank it bought in Serbia. After that, they sold the second block to the B2 fund.

A Greek bank, with the help of its parent bank, has cleaned up its balance sheet by getting rid of NPLs, for which it set out EUR 42 million. An Italian bank has also started getting rid of its NPLs with the help of its parent bank. It has sold such loans in the amount of EUR 65 million so far, and they are preparing to sell another block, worth EUR 95 million.

Each sixth loan granted by banks to companies in Serbia is now a NPL. These loans make up 15% of loans in the banking sector, so banks are increasingly more often secretly selling them to specialized funds.

A Blic source close to the NPL market says that non-performing loans are most often several years old, but that there are those who date back to the 1990s.

– The banks' goal is to get at least something out of non-performing loans and clean up their balance sheets. To that end, they're sometimes selling NPLs worth several dozen million euros. These are mostly loans to small and medium private enterprises, but also to state-owned enterprises in bankruptcy and restructuring, sometimes several decades old – says the newspaper's interviewee.

In the last two years, NPLs have been bought out at an average of 60% of their value. Some banks have gotten as little as EUR 50,000 from billion euro loans.