Foreign banks not keen to take over GTB

GTB CRISIS

Much as Global Trust Bank's (GTB) name was latched on with a host of foreign banks as possible suitors, the foreign banking community on Sunday stated that they are not keen to acquire GTB.

"Aside from the branch licences, there is nothing attractive in acquiring the badly managed private sector bank," said a senior foreign bank official.

Foreign banks have also turned chary of local acquisitions following HSBC's experience following its acquisition of UTI Bank stake. The RBI, aside from capping private and foreign banks' holding in private banks at 5 per cent, also tightened the rules on cross holdings in the first week of July.

Foreign banks, which are keen to acquire a domestic private sector bank in order to grow inorganically, are looking for a healthy balance sheet and good client base.

"In the case of GTB, even the customer base will need to be reprofiled," said a source in a leading European bank.

He said with the kind of loans dealt out by the senior management at the branch level, a complete reprofiling of employees could be necessary. "What would a foreign bank thus gain from this? Just a few branch licences?" he asked.

The International Finance Corporation has been slowly exiting from the bank since late last year. It earlier had a 10 per cent stake, which it had gradually sold down to 1.51 per cent.

Other prospective foreign suitors whose names were clubbed with GTB include Newbridge Capital and a consortium of foreign institutional investors including Warburg Pincus.

With the bank's assets said to be of poor quality, any acquirer would have to start afresh and for the amount of time and effort required to be put into the loss-making bank with non-performing assets in excess of Rs 1,500 crore, "we would not look at acquiring the bank at any price", said the chief executive officer of a foreign bank.