Aristotelis (Telis) Mistakidis, formerly Glencore’s top copper trader and now a billionaire investor, is in talks to buy small but expanding Greek shipping lender Aegean Baltic Bank (ABBank).
A negotiating team representing Mistakidis has submitted a “specific” offer to the shareholders of the bank, he said in an interview with Kathimerini on Sunday.
“If the offer is accepted, we will proceed [with a buyout]. If not, we won’t,” Mistakidis said.
In case a deal materialises, Mistakidis said his first move would be to proceed to a “considerable capital increase” in ABBank to boost its lending volume and spread risk by expanding to new areas.
Athens-based ABBank is a niche shipping lender that had €1.02bn ($1.09bn) in assets at the end of March.
The company lost about a tenth of its deposits in the first quarter, possibly as a result of bank market jitters worldwide. In its latest financial results, it said that deposits have “stabilised”.
ABBank is backed by the Coustas and Tsakos families, who own a 48% stake through a 50:50 joint venture called Costanos.
The family of chief executive Theodore Afthonidis, who set up ABBank in 2002 in cooperation with HSH Nordbank, holds a 42% stake.
The 10% balance is held by investment funds Serengeti, Orasis Capital and Chenavari, as well as by some of the ship-finance veterans that form part of the lender’s workforce of about 100 employees.
According to Greek ship-finance sources, Mistakidis aims to acquire a controlling stake of more than 50% in the bank.
That would happen by acquiring John Coustas’s stake in Costanos, shares held by some of the funds who wish to exit their investment, as well as part of the founding Afthonidis family’s holding.
In his interview published on Sunday, Mistakidis praised the Afthonidis management, which suggests it will continue playing a leading role in the bank after a possible takeover.
“From ABBank’s establishment to this day, management has done a very good job,” he said.
“Just consider that [Greece’s] so-called systemic banks were forced to do three capital increases ... and ABBank not one.”
Under its current management, ABBank already made moves to diversify outside its core, counter-cyclical ship-financing business to other areas such as real estate and renewable energies.
A fruition of the talks would not be Mistakidis’ first investment in shipping nor Greek banking.
The former Glencore manager, whose wealth is estimated at more than $3bn since the commodity giant went public, has invested in the bulker-buying campaign of Laurent Cadji-led Union Maritime, as TradeWinds first reported in late 2021.
In the rare interview he granted to Kathimerini, Mistakidis was coy to comment on his shipping investments.
“I think it [shipping] is in the blood of every Greek,” he said, adding that his considerable investments are managed by valued Greek partners.
“We’ve created a very good and effective team,” he said.
Mistakidis’ financial investments in Greece include a stake in Piraeus Bank — one of Greece’s four systemic lenders that almost went bankrupt during the country’s debt crisis a few years ago and which attracted overseas hedge fund investors after the country’s European Union-funded bailout.
Mistakidis’ other Greek investments include property in Thessaloniki, the northern port town he was born in 1962.
He said in the interview that now is the “perfect time” to invest in Greece as the nation emerges from its debt crisis.
Mistakidis’ interest in becoming a major investor in ABBank coincides with a revival of Greek bank lending to the country’s shipowners.
As TradeWinds reported on Friday, citing an annual survey by Petrofin Research, the volume of homegrown loans to predominantly Greek owners rose for a sixth consecutive year in 2022 to $14.1bn.
More than one in four dollars borrowed from a bank by Hellenic shipowners comes from a local lender.
