Santoro is controlled by Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s richest woman and a daughter of José Eduardo dos Santos, the president of Angola.
“Relative (…) to certain news reports published about its shareholding in BPI, CaixaBank informs that it has not reached, at the current date, an accord with the BPI shareholder Santoro – Finance Prestação de Serviços”, the Spanish institution said in a statement issued through Portugal’s securities markets authority, the CMVM.
Barcelona-based CaixaBank also said that it “continues to maintain contacts with Santoro – Finance Prestação de Serviços, with the aim of finding a solution that can be acceptable for all interested parties and will inform the market at the right time on the result of these contacts”.
The statement was issued after a report in the online edition of Portuguese newspaper Expresso that suggested that CaixaBank and Santoro had all but reached a deal.
Last week other media took up the subject, with Diário Económico reporting that “Isabel dos Santos and CaixaBank are finalising the deal to unblock the shareholder impasse in BPI, paving the way for control of the Portuguese bank by the Catalans and the handover of [BPI’s Angolan subsidiary] BFA to the businesswoman.”
It added that such an agreement would enable BPI to meet demands from the European Central Bank (ECB) “that it reduce its exposure to Angola”.
Jornal de Negócios reports that “Isabel dos Santos and CaixaBank already have a price for the BPI deal” while Diário de Notícias has the headline “CaixaBank and Isabel dos Santos finalise accord for BPI” and reports that control of BPI “puts CaixaBank in the fight for Novo Banco” - another Portuguese bank that is currently up for sale.
BPI’s two main shareholders, Santoro and Caixabank, announced on 2 March that they were in talks concerning a solution for the bank that could meet ECB rules regarding its presence in Angola, but that they had not yet reached a deal.
Caixabank has 44.1 percent of BPI’s shares, although it may only exercise 20 percent of the votes due to company rules, while Santoro has 18.58 percent of the shares and voting rights.
Angola is among countries whose banking regulation and supervision the ECB has ruled are not at the level of the European Union, and that BPI must reduce its exposure to the market, where it has a 50.1 percent share of BFA, by 10 April.
However, the matter has thrown up differences between BPI’s two main shareholders.
The first plan drawn up by BPI to meet the ECB’s demands foresaw spinning off the African investments - in Angola and Mozambique - in a separate holding company with the same shareholders. However, Isabel dos Santos was against that solution and it was voted down by shareholders at an assembly on 5 February.
An alternative would be for Angolan telecommunications company Unitel - in which dos Santos has a 25 percent stake and which has 49.9 percent of BFA - to take a further stake in BFA off BPI’s hands, thus reducing the latter’s exposure to Angola. Unitel offered to pay BPI €140 million for 10 percent of BFA but the Portuguese bank’s board in January decided that that was not “a good solution” and the chairman later gave to understand that it is not something the ECB wants.
BFA is one of BPI’s most valuable assets: in 2015 more than half of BPI’s profit came from Angola.