Major Italian lender UniCredit said on Monday that it plans to buy up to 9% of Greek peer Alpha Bank, one of the biggest Greek lenders to shipping.
UniCredit’s offer, which comes as part of a broader cooperation plan with Alpha, effectively triggers a competitive auction process for the Alpha stake currently held by a European Union-funded bank bailout fund.
The maritime business did not feature in the rationale cited by the two companies as part of their strategic partnership, which focuses on Greek retail banking and its subsidiaries in Romania.
If the deal materialises, however, it could strengthen Alpha’s position vis-a-vis local rivals in Greece’s rapidly growing ship lending business.
According to the latest available figures as of the end of March, Alpha had a shipping portfolio of €2.9bn ($3.1bn).
This consisted of almost equal parts of bulkers and oil tankers, to 44% and 38% of the total portfolio, respectively. Container ships accounted for 10% of the total, while LNG carriers stood at 6%.
UniCredit’s offer is the first big move by a commercial lender into the Greek market after the country’s sovereign debt crisis.
It comes just two days after Standard & Poor’s became the first major credit rating agency since 2010 to grant investment-grade status to Greek government bonds.
Under the international bailout that followed Greece’s meltdown, the EU-funded Hellenic Financial Stability Fund took stakes in all of Greece’s major banks, including Alpha.
It is HFSF’s remaining 9% stake in Alpha that UniCredit offered to acquire on Monday.
HFSF welcomed the Italian company’s bid but said that it is required by law to sell its Greek bank stakes in a competitive tender. In the case of Alpha, this is expected to be launched in due time.
Even if it fails to acquire the Alpha stake held by HFSF, UniCredit pledged to buy up to 5% of Alpha stock through the open market on the Athens Stock Exchange.
As Greek banks like Alpha recover from the debt crisis, they assume a bigger role in financing Hellenic shipowners.
Over one in four dollars borrowed from a bank by Hellenic shipowners last year came from a local lender.
According to the latest edition of a long-term survey into Greek ship finance conducted annually by Petrofin Research, the volume of homegrown loans to Greek owners rose in 2022 for a sixth consecutive year to $14.1bn.
Neither Alpha, UniCredit, nor any other Greek bank currently subscribes to the Global Maritime Forum’s Poseidon Principles for sustainable ship lending.
