Barclays Chebanca! Sale to incur £200 million loss

Milan/London - Barclays is to sell its Italian bank branches to CheBanca!, the retail arm of Mediobanca, and take a £200 million ($298.52 million) loss on the deal.

Mediobanca said on Thursday CheBanca! would buy 89 branches with 220,000 clients, residential mortgage loans worth ?2.9 billion ($3.1 billion) and 620 staff.
The sale marks part of plans by Britain's third biggest bank to shed continental European retail banking operations as part of its retreat from businesses that are unprofitable or lack scale.
Reuters reported on Wednesday the deal was imminent.
Barclays is likely to be left with more than £10 billion - or ?14 billion - of Italian mortgages on its books, which it is trying to sell. It had £13.5 billion of Italian residential mortgages at the start of the year.
The bank said last year it would sell most of its continental European retail banking operations. The Italian sale will reduce Barclays' risk-weighted assets by about £800 million and result in a small decrease in its capital ratio. It will book the loss this quarter.
Barclays has already sold retail banking operations in Spain and Portugal and is seeking to sell in France. Other banks are also pulling back from Italy, including Deutsche Bank .
The Italian business is estimated to have been loss-making and Barclays will refinance the business with ?237 million before passing it to CheBanca!.
The deal will have a 20-basis point negative impact on Mediobanca's capital, which the bank said would be gradually recovered from earnings.
"The fact that (Barclays') management is comfortable agreeing to a capital dilutive disposal, combined with the group's recent success in passing the latest Bank of England stress testing exercise, suggests to us that market concerns about the bank's current capitalisation and the potential need to issue fresh equity to bolster this are very much overdone,"Gary Greenwood, analyst at Shore Capital, said.
Barclays shares were up 0.6 per cent and Mediobanca shares were up 0.7 per cent by 0850 GMT.