UniCredit said it had agreed to sell the riskier notes in a securitization issue backed by non-performing house mortgages with a gross book value of 4.1 billion euros ($4.5 billion).
The bank said on Tuesday it had transferred the loans to a securitization vehicle called Prisma, which had issued three tranches of mortgage-backed securities for a total of 2.3 billion euros to finance the purchase.
UniCredit said it could tap a state guarantee scheme on the 1.2 billion euro senior tranche, while it had agreed to sell 95% of both the mezzanine and junior tranches to a financial institution outside the group.
As a consequence, UniCredit said it had asked European Central Bank supervisors to acknowledge that the risk on the loans securitized no longer lay with the bank allowing it to clear them off its balance sheet.
Source: Reuters.com