Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank may ask shareholders and creditors to consider its second debt restructuring before year-end, according to two people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported. The people didn’t give details of the plan and declined to be identified because the information isn’t public.
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Kazakhstan
BTA Bank may ask the Kazakh government to back its second debt restructuring or provide additional state funds to help avert bankruptcy, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, Bloomberg reported. BTA may seek a capital injection of more than $4 billion, said the people, who declined to be identified because the information isn’t public. Lazard Freres & Co., which acted as an adviser to BTA during its debt reorganization in 2009, assessed the cost of another restructuring last month, the people said.
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A Kazakhstan bank's bid to use the U.S. bankruptcy court to halt an overseas legal proceeding could drag the court into disputes in which the U.S. itself has little at stake, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. Kazakhstan's JSC BTA Bank says the U.S. bankruptcy court's decision to grant it Chapter 15 protection in the U.S. after it underwent restructuring in its home country last year extended a key benefit of U.S. bankruptcy law: the automatic stay that halts legal action against a debtor company.
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Russian state-owned bank Sberbank is seeking a seat on the board of failed Kazakh bank BTA, the head of Kazakhstan's national welfare fund, Kairat Kelimbetov, said on Friday. "The talks are only with Sberbank," Kelimbetov, who also has a seat on Sberbank's supervisory board, told Reuters. "We are formulating a plan for the next 2-3 years." The welfare fund owns BTA. Sberbank has been in talks to take over the bankrupt Kazakh lender, one of the largest in the oil rich central Asian state. If it takes a board seat it would likely signal the takeover is ready to proceed.
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Alliance Bank, Kazakhstan's sixth-largest lender by assets, plans to issue $1 billion of recovery notes with a maturity of seven years as it returns to profit this year following its debt restructuring, Reuters reported. Alliance, the first of four Kazakh banks to default on its debt, expects a profit of 448 billion tenge ($3.0 billion) in 2010, Chief Executive Maksat Kabashev said on Tuesday. He said the following three years would also be profitable.
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Creditors who hold 92 percent of BTA Bank’s $16.7 billion of debt approved a restructuring plan, including bonds held by the parent company of Kazakhstan’s third-largest lender by assets, BusinessWeek reported on a Bloomberg story. BTA defaulted in April, 2009, two months after it was taken over by the state-owned National Wellbeing Fund Samruk-Kazyna. Besides BTA, which was the country’s biggest lender before its collapse, Alliance Bank, AO Astana Finance and Temirbank, then controlled by BTA, have also defaulted, leaving about $20 billion in debt.
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Alliance Bank, the second-largest Kazakh lender to default last year, said it completed restructuring 677 billion tenge ($4.6 billion) of debt, BusinessWeek reported on a Bloomberg story. Under a plan accepted by creditors in December, all of Alliance’s obligations were “restructured and annulled in exchange for money, new bonds and shares,” the lender said in an e-mailed statement today. The bank plans to start borrowing from abroad next year after markets open for Kazakh lenders, Chief Executive Officer Maksat Kabashev told reporters in Almaty.
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JSC Alliance Bank, the sixth-largest bank in Kazakhstan by net loans, filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy to protect itself from U.S. lawsuits and creditor claims while it reorganizes at home, BusinessWeek reported on a Bloomberg story. The Almaty-based company listed both debt and assets of more than $1 billion in documents filed today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. JSC “experienced severe liquidity difficulties” following the worldwide financial crisis, according to the papers.
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BTA Bank, the second-largest bank in Kazakhstan by assets, filed for bankruptcy protection to shield itself from U.S. creditors while it restructures about $11.6 billion in debt, BusinessWeek reported on a Bloomberg story. The Almaty-based bank listed both debt and assets of more than $1 billion in Chapter 15 documents filed today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. Chapter 15 of the bankruptcy code is designed to block U.S. lawsuits against a foreign company with assets in the U.S. while it restructures in its home country. Most of BTA Bank’s U.S.
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Temirbank, a unit of BTA Bank, Kazakhstan’s second-biggest lender by assets, said its decision to default last month came after the value of bad loans on its books quadrupled, a Temirbank managing director said. Temirbank’s bad loans soared to 80.6 billion tenge ($543 million) in the third quarter from 22.2 billion tenge in the second, according to a filing on the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange Web site, BusinessWeek reported on a Bloomberg story. Erulan Kusainov said the increase followed the bank’s third-quarter decision to halt extensions made on “masses” of loans in 2008.
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