Portugal

Art work and office buildings are being sold by bankruptcy receivers for the Espirito Santo group of companies that collapsed last year amid fraud allegations, The Wall Street Journal reported. The 36-story Espírito Santo Plaza in Miami went on the block in April after Luxembourg officials managing the bankrupt companies hired Florida’s EXAN Capital to manage the sale. The office and condominium tower, located in Miami’s Brickell Avenue financial district, is expected to fetch at least $120 million based on market prices.

Former Banco Espírito Santo SA Chief Executive Ricardo Salgado on Thursday dismissed findings from an audit conducted into the bank’s collapse that pointed the finger at his administration and accused the country’s central bank of leading a smear campaign against him, The Wall Street Journal reported. In his second public appearance since the bank failed in August, Mr.

Portugal's Novo Banco, the bank carved out of Banco Espirito Santo after a state rescue last year, expects to sharply reduce its loss this year and return to profits in 2016, emboldened by recovering deposits and improving liquidity. Novo Banco, which the state plans to sell this year to recover 4.9 billion euros in rescue loans injected in August, reported on Monday a 468-million-euro ($510 million) loss for August-December because of provisions and one-off charges.

Banco Espirito Santo (BES) breached the Bank of Portugal's orders by increasing exposure to its founding family's collapsing businesses in the months before the state rescued the bank last August, a forensic audit report showed. The central bank, worried about the financial state of the family empire's holding ESI, had told BES in late 2013 not to increase exposure to the Espirito Santo Group and not to pass any of the group's debt on to BES' retail clients.

Portugal plans to make an early payment of about €14 billion of its bailout loans from the International Monetary Fund after borrowing costs dropped, prime minister Pedro Passos Coelho said, the Irish Times reported. “The market conditions that Portugal has access to now are more favourable that those agreed on with the IMF and therefore we will save in the future by paying part of the IMF loan early,” Mr Coelho said.

The Bank of Portugal on Tuesday stuck to a decision to keep a loan linked to Goldman Sachs in a "bad bank" carved out after the rescue of Banco Espirito Santo (BES), putting the central bank and Goldman Sachs on course for a legal battle. The central bank said any remaining doubts could only be clarified in court. Goldman responded that it intended "to pursue all appropriate legal remedies without delay". The Wall Street bank and some of its clients lent BES $835 million in July last year using an entity it created called Oak Finance Luxembourg SA.

The Bank of Portugal has trimmed down the list of potential bidders for Novo Banco - the successor to Banco Espirito Santo after a state rescue - saying that 15 out of 17 institutions that had expressed interest in the sale met its requirements, Reuters reported. The central bank said in a statement on Monday it asked the 15 pre-qualified institutions to sign a confidentiality agreement, after which they will have until March 20 to present non-binding offers. It did not provide any names or details.

British regulators have fined the former investment banking business of the troubled Portuguese lender Banco Espírito Santo for failing to disclose the departure of central staff members from one of its capital markets teams in 2013, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. The move is the first time that the Financial Conduct Authority of Britain has used its relatively new powers to fine so-called financial sponsors that act as advisers on initial public offerings and other stock listings.

The sale of Novo Banco, the lender that emerged from the breakup of Portugal’s Banco Espirito Santo, has drawn interest from 17 entities after firms including Banco Santander and Banco BPI said they may make bids. The Bank of Portugal announced the number following the New Year’s Eve deadline for entering the process, saying it would check whether the parties met pre-qualification requirements. Potential investors will get information and be invited to present non-binding bids. The Lisbon-based central bank is not identifying entities at this stage.

Portugal's securities market regulator, CMVM, said on Wednesday Angolan billionaire businesswoman Isabel dos Santos has to increase the 1.35 euro a share price in her takeover bid for Portugal Telecom SGPS. CMVM said in a statement it did not accept arguments presented by Dos Santos' Terra Peregrin company for an exemption from the rule that dictates that the bidding price has to be at least the share's average price over the last six months.