Blackstone and Apollo out of the race to acquire Depfa Bank

Blackstone Group and Apollo Global Management are out of the race to acquire Hypo Real Estate Holding AG’s Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

JC Flowers and Co, a group led by Third Point, the New York-based hedge fund, and a bid involving Oswald Gruebel, former chief executive of UBS AG and Credit Suisse Group AG, and Mead Park Holdings, a New York-based hedge fund, remain in the talks, said sources who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.

Officials from Blackstone, Apollo, JC Flowers, Mead Park and Gruebel each declined to comment. Walter Allwicher, spokesman for Munich-based Hypo Real Estate, said the company is in talks with a “selected number of bidders”, which he declined to identify.

Hypo Real Estate drew offers between €250 million and €350 million for Depfa in January, two people said at the time. Hypo must sell the unit, a provider of public-sector finance, by the end of the year under a restructuring approved by the European Commission in 2011.

Hedge fund
The EU review was triggered after Germany injected €10 billion into Hypo Real Estate to save it. Blackstone, the world's biggest manager of alternative assets such as private equity and property, had been bidding with Och-Ziff Capital Management LLC, a US hedge-fund firm run by Daniel Och, said two of the people.

Officials from Och-Ziff also declined to comment.

Depfa had €54 billion of assets at the end of September, according to a company presentation on its website, dated November 19th. Hypo Real Estate said last month it may sign an agreement to sell the unit in the first half of this year. – (Bloomberg)