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Sydney Morning Herald – BNP Paribas SA, France’s biggest bank, agreed to take control of Fortis in Belgium and Luxembourg for 14.5 billion euros ($26 billion), completing a breakup of the lender after a government rescue failed.
BNP Paribas will pay 9 billion euros in stock and 5.5 billion euros in cash for 75% of Fortis Bank Belgium, all of the Belgian insurance operations and 67% of Fortis’s bank in Luxembourg, the Paris-based bank said in a e-mailed statement today. Fortis’s risky assets will be split off into a separate entity.
“It means excellent conditions for buying a network with a government guaranty,” said Emmanuel Soupre, a fund manager who helps oversee about $31 billion, including BNP Paribas shares, at Neuflize OBC Asset Management in Paris. “It’s like buying a home with all the works at the expenses of the old landlord.”
Reuters Paris – European hedge funds have had a bad week due to the market turmoil from the bailout of AIG and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the co-founder of French fund of hedge fund manager ERAAM said on Thursday.
Paris-based ERAAM selects European hedge funds in which to invest its clients’ money and constantly monitors the performance of these hedge funds.
"This is a bad week. The driver of the market is not valuations any more. It’s just rumours and liquidity," said Cyril Julliard.
"Some could have been short on HBOS and long on Morgan Stanley," he added, referring to the British retail bank and U.S. investment bank.
Bloomberg- Bank of America Corp. agreed to sell its prime brokerage unit that serves hedge funds to BNP Paribas SA, France’s biggest bank, for as much as $300 million after profit at its investment bank tumbled.
BNP Paribas’s purchase price includes some goodwill, Todd Steinberg, head of equities and derivatives in Paris-based BNP Paribas’ Americas unit, said in an e-mail. The division provides record-keeping, securities lending and secured financing to more than 500 hedge funds and has 320 employees, he said.
Bloomberg – Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he’s “never heard of” Bill Browder, founder of the hedge-fund firm Hermitage Capital Management Inc. who has been barred from Russia since November 2005.
“I never heard of that name before,” Putin said in an interview with French newspaper Le Monde transmitted live to journalists in Paris yesterday. “If this person thinks his rights have been violated, let him go to court.”
Browder, 44, a U.S.-born British citizen, is banned from returning to Russia under a law that keeps out people denoted as threatening “the security of the state, public order or public health.” Hermitage, once the largest foreign owner of Russian stocks, said in April it’s a victim of corporate identity theft in Russia.
Putin, who stepped aside as president to become prime minister earlier this month, was queried about Browder’s exclusion at a press conference in St. Petersburg in July 2006. Putin said then he didn’t know who the reporter was talking about and could only presume he must have broken the law.
