By Harry Wilson
Lloyds Banking Group is set to sell its German insurance business for less than half the €1bn it was worth two years ago as it continues to scale back its international operations.
The taxpayer-backed lender is in talks to sell Heidelberger Leben to German insurer Hannover Re for as much as €400m (£341m), bringing to an end a long-running sales process for the life insurance provider.
The likely sale price is less than half the price Lloyds had originally been hoping to achieve.
Reports two years ago suggested a potential value of at least €1bn, however under pressure to speed up the sale of its international operations and with regulators pushing banks to hold more capital, the offer from Hannover Re is thought to have been impossible for Lloyds to ignore.
Hannover Re is understood to be prepared to pay as much as €400m, however a source close to the deal said the eventual sale price was likely to be lower.
A spokesman for Lloyds declined to comment.
An announcement from Lloyds of the sale of Heidelberger Leben is expected as soon as this week, though other bidders are known to retain interest in the business. Heidelberger Leben had attracted interest from several insurers, as well as private equity firms such as US buy-out groups JC Flowers and Wilbur Ross.
Lloyds acquired Heidelberger following its merger in 2008 with troubled lender HBOS, which bought the business in 2005.
Following the sale, Lloyds will continue to offer life insurance to German customers through its Clerical Medical brand, which will not be affected by the latest disposals.
The unit was identified as a "non-core" part of Lloyds in chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio’s review of the lender’s businesses.
Since taking over in 2011, Mr Horta-Osorio has overseen the sale of several of the bank’s overseas operations, including large parts of its private bank.
In May, Lloyds sold its Geneva-based private banking business to Union Bancaire Privee for £100m, as well as its Miami branch to Spain’s Banco Sabadell for £8m.
Next month, Lloyds will relaunch the TSB brand as the prelude to the stock market listing of its 631 "Project Verde" branches. The launch will take place on Sept 9, with the business likely to float on the London market in the middle of next year.
Executives from Lloyds are currently meeting European officials to discuss an extension to a deadline to offload the business, which will expire at the end of October. Lloyds had been expected to sell the branches to the Co-op Bank, however it was forced to pull out as regulators raised concerns over its ability to finance the deal.
The latest sale is understood to be capital accretive, meaning it will help bolster the bank’s core Tier 1 ratio, which currently stands at 9.6pc.
The Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), Britain’s top bank regulator, identified capital shortfalls in several major lenders, including Barclays, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland.
However, the PRA said that current capital generation plans, including disposals, would be sufficient to allow Lloyds and RBS to satisfy its concerns.
Barclays is currently in the process of raising billions of pounds of capital after the PRA said the bank would not meet a new so-called "leverage ratio" benchmark that measures a bank’s equity capital as a proportion of its total assets.
British banks have been told they must hold equity equal in value to at least 3pc of their assets. Barclays is next month expected to launch a £5.8bn rights issue and is also planning a sale of £2bn of bonds convertible into its shares.
Source: The Telegraph
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