December 30 (SeeNews) - Slovenia's Nova Ljubljanska Banka (NLB) [LJE:NLBR] has completed the acquisition of an 83.23% ordinary shareholding in Serbian blue-chip lender Komercijalna Banka [BEL:KMBN] for 394.7 million euro ($485 million), thus becoming the third largest banking group in Serbia, NLB said on Wednesday.
With the closing of the purchase, NLB has reached a final milestone in this transaction, to further execute its strategy of becoming the leading financial institution focused on and headquartered in Southeast Europe (SEE), NLB said in a filing with the Ljubljana Stock Exchange.
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NLB has paid the agreed price to the Serbian state budget, the Serbian finance ministry said in a separate statement.
"Apart from the 395 million euro paid into the budget of the Republic of Serbia today, I will remind you that about 60 million euro, or about 7 billion dinars, were paid into the budget earlier, of which 3.7 billion dinars refer to the contractual obligation to distribute as dividend half of last year's profit," finance minister Sinisa Mali noted.
The acquisition increased NLB's market share in Serbia in terms of total assets to 12% as at September 30 from about 2% previously, adding more than 800,000 active retail customers and a distribution network of 203 branches, the largest in the country, NLB said.
"This milestone will not alter the overall strategic focus of the NLB Group, nor will it affect our vision. We are committed to building a modern, digitalised, and efficient bank, and to become the leading bank on the Serbian market by 2025," NLB CEO Blaz Brodnjak stated.
The transaction, which received all necessary regulatory approvals, will increase loans to customers of NLB by almost 1.8 billion euro and deposits by approximately 3.3 billion euro, the Slovenian bank noted. It added that through Komercijalna's subsidiary banks in Bosnia and Montenegro, the acquisition will further strengthen NLB's strong position in those two markets.
"Komercijalna Banka is performing very well despite the many challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to all of our economies and societies. I am therefore very confident that the bank’s performance will be further enhanced by joining NLB as part of a banking group active across SEE. This has been a demanding process that has required a lot of work and expertise, so we are especially pleased that we have completed it successfully and transparently," the president of the executive board of Komercijalna, Vladimir Medan, said.
Komercijalna Banka achieved approximately 170 million euro in net banking revenues in 2019. In the first half of 2020, marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, the bank achieved almost 80 million euro in net banking revenues.
($ = 0.814031 euro)
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