Dutch financial group Rabobank has decided to take direct ownership of the remaining €3.2 billion of loans at its former ACC Bank unit in Ireland as it considers a sale of the deeply-distressed portfolio next year.
The loans will continue to be managed on an outsourced basis by Link Asset Services, meaning customers should see no change in how their borrowings are serviced, Rabobank said on Thursday. The transfer will take effect in mid-December.
Sources told The Irish Times in August that Rabobank was advancing plans to sell the former ACC Bank loans, after it signalled in its first-half report that it had reclassified the portfolio as part of its pool "financial assets" that would not be held until maturity.
Founded in 1927 as a state-owned lender called Agricultural Credit Corporation (ACC), it was acquired by Rabobank, the Netherlands's biggest mortgage lender, in 2002.
ACC was the smallest of Ireland’s 11 retail lenders before the crash, but its increased focus on commercial property lending during the boom landed it in trouble along with wider sector in 2008.
The bank handed back its licence to the Central Bank in 2014 and was renamed as ACC Loan Management.
The latest set of accounts for ACC Loan Management show it had taken a €1.88 million bad loans charge against the €3.2 billion portfolio, indicating that it only expected to recover a little over 40 per cent - or €1.32 billion - of its total loans.
