By Gianluca Semeraro and Francesca Landini
MILAN (Reuters) - UniCredit has entered final phase talks to sell its debt recovery unit and a chunk of bad debt, two sources close to the matter told Reuters on Friday, a move aimed at strengthening its balance sheet and freeing up funds for new lending.
UniCredit has entered exclusive talks with a consortium comprising U.S. asset manager Fortress Investment Group and Italy's Prelios to sell its UniCredit Credit Management Bank (UCCMB), they said.
The deal could raise more than 600 million euros (472.61 million pounds), making it the biggest transaction in distressed debt signed in Italy for several years after other Italian lenders scrapped similar sales some months ago.
One of the sources said UniCredit, Italy's biggest bank by assets, aimed to clinch a deal "in a reasonable time", while the second person said the bank will set up a 10-year partnership with the buyer to manage its loans servicing business.
UniCredit chose the Fortress-Prelios consortium ahead of a rival bid from a team of investors led by Lone Star.
Fortress-Prelios will buy UniCredit's 98 percent stake in UCCMB, the unit's business operations or "platform", and part of a bad loan portfolio worth 3.4 billion euros, the sources said.
UCCMB manages more than 40 billion euros of non-performing loans, 20 percent of which belong to UniCredit, while the rest are owned by other banks and several other entities. It has more than 700 employees and is based in the northern town of Verona.
After the sale UCCMB will continue to manage small-ticket bad loans on UniCredit's books while credit with large clients will be managed by the lender directly, sources have said.
Suitors had to present a business plan for UCCMB and the seller scrutinised carefully their attitude on potential layoffs and their plans for UCCMB's future development.
Both UniCredit's CEO and a top executive for Fortress have given assurances the sale would not impact employees, but unions are opposed to the transaction.
HARD TO SELL
In Italy, non-performing loans rose to 173.9 billion euros in August, the highest level since the current statistical series began in 1998.
Banks, however, are finding it hard to shed distressed debt as prices offered in many cases fall short of the book value of the assets, experts involved in some transactions said.
The completion of the euro zone stress tests could help unlock further bad loan deals, experts said.
Since Italy was engulfed by the sovereign debt crisis at the end of 2011 there has been only one large bad debt deal, by Intesa Sanpaolo, which sold 1.64 billion euros of bad loans to Deutsche Bank in February 2012 for 270 million euros.
(Reporting by Gianluca Semeraro, writing by Francesca Landini, editing by Emilio Parodi and David Evans)