Regarding the bidding process for a minority participation in the bank, NORD/LB Norddeutsche Landesbank has today received a joint offer from two financial investors. NORD/LB had launched a formal bidding process in autumn 2018 and had received four offers from potential bidders after the first selection phase in December. On this basis, negotiations have been held in the past few weeks with investors on the main framework conditions of a participation and on strategic matters. At the same time, NORD/LB and its owners had signalled that they are open to participate in a possible solution within the German public banking sector as well.
“We will thoroughly evaluate the offer from the two investors and take a decision together with our owners on how to proceed”, Thomas Bürkle, CEO of NORD/LB, said. He expressed confidence that a fundamental strategic decision would be taken soon. “We also remain open to a solution within the public sector.”
On the bank’s further prospects, Bürkle stated: “NORD/LB is a well-positioned bank in various profitable business areas. That’s why we succeeded in the last few years in managing one of the most serious crises of all time in ship financing. We are now well on the way to clean up our ship financing portfolio by significantly reducing our legacy NPL portfolio. We are also making major progress in transforming the Bank and optimising our processes. We are on target to meeting the goals we set ourselves at the beginning of 2017 when we launched our One Bank transformation programme, thereby future-proofing NORD/LB.”
About NORD/LB
With total assets of € 155 billion, NORD/LB Norddeutsche Landesbank is one of Germany’s leading merchant banks. Its core business segments include structured finance in the energy and infrastructure sector, ship and aircraft finance, corporate client business, commercial real estate finance, capital market business and private and commercial client business including private banking. The Bank has headquarters in Hanover, Braunschweig and Magdeburg. NORD/LB also has branches in Bremen, Oldenburg, Hamburg, Schwerin, Düsseldorf, Munich and Stuttgart. Outside Germany, NORD/LB is active in Luxembourg with a covered bond bank (NORD/LB Covered Bond Bank) and also has offices in London, New York, Singapore and Shanghai.
