Emirates NBD, Russia's Sberbank revise price for Turkey's Denizbank


Emirates NBD and Sberbank yesterday said they updated a sales agreement on Tuesday regarding a May 2018 deal and have increased the price in the deal to TL 15.48 billion ($2.77 billion) from TL 14.6 billion.

Although the deal's lira value is higher, the dollar value when it was announced in May was put at the equivalent of $3.2 billion, about $400 million more than the new price.

Sberbank, Russia's biggest bank by assets, bought Denizbank in 2012 for TL 6.5 billion as it was trying to establish a presence abroad.

Denizbank's equity amounted to TL 15.51 billion as of Dec. 31, Emirates NBD said in a bourse statement.

For Emirates NBD, the revised deal represents a discount of roughly 20 percent, a spokesman for the bank told Reuters, without providing further details.

The deal will help Emirates NBD diversify its business and establish itself as a leading bank in the region, the bank's vice chairman Hesham Abdulla al-Qassim said in May.

The sale price is based on Denizbank's capital plus 5 percent, according to international financial reporting standards, Sberbank said. The bank added that it expected the deal to be closed by the end of the second quarter of 2019.

Denizbank was first acquired by Turkey's Zorlu Holding in 1997 from the Privatization Administration. The bank was further acquired in October 2006 by Dexia, a Franco-Belgian financial group from Europe. Having been run by Dexia for six years, Denizbank has operated under Sberbank since 2012.

The Emirates NBD banking group is an important player in the United Arab Emirates' (UAE) corporate and retail banking sector. It has been operating actively in different areas, including Islamic banking, private banking and asset management. Emirates NBD runs 230 branches worldwide and has operations in the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, Singapore and the U.K. and representatives in China and Indonesia.

Denizbank surged as much as 13 percent in Istanbul, although only 0.15 percent of the shares are available for trading. Denizbank is Turkey's ninth-largest bank by assets as of the end of September, according to banking association data. Denizbank has approximately 11.8 million clients and a network of 708 branches in Turkey.