Bank of Ireland, the country's largest bank, has hired Deutsche Bank AG to sell an almost €3 billion portion of its project finance business.
The business will comprise mostly infrastructure loans in the UK and will exclude its Irish business, spokeswoman Anne Mathews said in a telephone interview today.
The bank has also hired Hawkpoint Partners Ltd. to advise it on the sale of Burdale Finance Ltd, an asset-based lender bought in 2005 for €71 million.
Bank of Ireland's portfolio is made of more than 150 transactions. It was involved in a £95 million facility for the Greater Manchester waste project, Ms Mathews said. The bank was also one of the lenders to a €357 million financing for the development of Arsenal Football Club's 60,000-seat stadium at Ashburton in London.
The unit, set up in 1996, employs about 25 people in the UK and the US.
It arranges project financing transactions in Ireland, the UK, Europe, the Middle East, North America and Australia, she said.
The central bank instructed four lenders last Thursday to raise €24 billion and announced plans to merge two of them. The Government has already injected €46.3 billion into the financial services industry and set up the National Asset Management Agency that has paid more than €30 billion for banks' risky property loans in the past year.
The total equates to about two-thirds the size of the Irish economy.
Bank of Ireland must raise €5.2 billion after the central bank published the outcome of stress tests of lenders. The lender, already 36 per cent-owned by the state, has also been directed to dispose of about €30 billion of non-core loans.
Bloomberg