(Bloomberg) -- Raiffeisen Bank International AG is trying to raise new capital to replace an Additional Tier 1 bond more than six months after an earlier deal failed due to the lender’s struggle to exit its Russian operations.
The Austrian bank is offering €650 million ($685.6 million) of new AT1 bonds on Monday, with the coupon set at 7.375%, down from initial price talks of around 7.75%, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified. Raiffeisen is also offering to buy back an older issue for the same amount at 101.875% of its face value, it said in a notice. The older note’s price jumped.
A successful sale would mark the end of long-standing uncertainty for holders on the bonds. The lender has already missed several chances to repay the notes as investors have demanded high financing costs amid prolonged efforts to exit its Russian subsidiary.
The bank offered to sell a new bond and buy back the old issue in March, but that operation failed on the back of a report that US authorities were pushing the lender to drop a plan that would’ve allowed it to repatriate as much as €1.5 billion stuck in Russia.
The note had first become callable in late 2022 but the high cost of replacement, at a time when major central banks were still raising policy rates to fight inflation, made it one of few cases in Europe’s AT1 market for a bank to skip its first call. Raiffeisen has passed further options to repay the bond since, including one whose notice period expired last week.
Should the bank buy back the entire old note through the latest tender, it will pay €12.2 million more than if it had exercised the call option at par.
A spokesperson said the bank practically had until late October to decide on the call. Also, it decided to bring the AT1 issue forward from a plan to print in January after uncertainty stemming from the US election dimmed.
Raiffeisen’s Russian unit accounted for almost half of the lender’s pretax profit in the third quarter, but capital controls mean it can’t access those gains. A Russian court order freezing shares in the business has further delayed efforts to sell the unit.
Even so, the lender’s shares have rallied 9% this month on bets that Donald Trump’s election victory will lead to an earlier end to fighting in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Raiffeisen said it completed a significant risk transfer tied to €2.8 billion of corporate loans in Austria, Slovakia, Germany and the Czech Republic. The credit risk of a mezzanine tranche of loans was assumed by institutional investors, while Raiffeisen retained the risk of the junior and senior portions, the bank said.
At group level, the transaction will strengthen Raiffeisen’s common equity tier 1 ratio by approximately 16 basis points, it said.
SRTs, also known as synthetic risk transfers, allow banks to insure their loans against default by selling notes to investors such as pension, sovereign wealth and hedge funds. For banks, the benefit is that they are able to tie up less of their own capital to meet regulatory requirements.
(Adds SRT deal, background on Russia operations)
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