February 20 (SeeNews) - Serbia's finance ministry said it has picked the 11.3 million euro ($12.8 million) offer of German financial company EOS Matrix in its tender for the sale of a portfolio of non-performing loans (NPLs).
The portfolio includes loans of Serbia's insolvent lenders Agrobanka, Nova Agrobanka, Univerzal Banka, Privredna Banka Beograd and Razvojna Banka Vojvodine, the ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
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Two binding bids were submitted in the tender and the offer of EOS Matrix was assessed as the most favourable.
The government plans to sell all NPLs currently owned by Serbia's deposit insurance agency in the next 24 months, the finance ministry said.
In October, finance minister Sinisa Mali said the NPL portfolio to be offered in the tender had a value of 240 million euro. Serbia's deposit insurance agency managed NPLs of about 800 million euro at the time and the tender would be the first step in resolving them after 18 years, Mali said.
The NPL ratio in Serbia's banking sector declined by 4.1 percentage points on the year to 5.7% at the end of December. The share of NPLs in the banking sector was reduced by 16.7 percentage points from the level recorded in August 2015 when the NPL Resolution Strategy was adopted, Serbia's central bank said in its February inflation report
($ = 0.881766 euro)