Saturday, 14 November 2015 20:22
ATHENS: Greece’s Alpha Bank got shareholder approval on Saturday for a plan to fill a capital hole identified in a European Central Bank health check last month.
Alpha Bank, whose biggest shareholder is the country’s HFSF bank rescue fund with 66.2 percent, was found to need 263 million euros under the ECB stress test’s baseline scenario and 2.74 billion euros under more adverse assumptions.
“The bank is now aiming to raise 1.55 billion euros through the share offering,” Lazaros Papagaryfallou, a strategic planning executive, told shareholders. “It may need a small amount of state aid or possibly none at all.”
Alpha and Greece’s other three big banks – National , Piraeus and Eurobank – have started raising money to plug a 14.4 billion euro ($ 15.5 billion) capital hole, a sum 4.7 times their combined market value.
Alpha’s capital plan includes a one-for-50 reverse share split, an issue of new shares without pre-emptive rights for current shareholders and a possible issue of contingent convertible bonds (CoCos).
Alpha executives told shareholders the ECB had approved 180 million euros of so-called capital actions, which will help to reduce the bank’s capital gap by an equal amount.
The bank has also generated capital of 1.01 billion euros via an offer to bondholders to swap certain classes of debt for new shares. All this has cut the bank’s capital shortfall to 1.55 billion euros from 2.74 billion.
Earlier this week, Alpha announced it was seeking to raise 1.66 billion euros by selling new shares.
Alpha’s Board Chairman Vassilis Rapanos told the assembly the order book on the share offering was expected to close on Monday.
