Thomson’s Urbicus does debt deal with RBS
A TRIO of Scottish investors has joined forces with one of New York’s most powerful hedge funds to buy an estimated £250 million debt package from Royal Bank of Scotland.
Urbicus, a specialist debt business set up by former Noble Group chief executive Ben Thomson, picturted below, and Hazeldene’s Mark Shaw, has teamed up with Elliot Associates to acquire part of a debt that backed the troubled Glanmore property fund.
Marcus Rennie, a former senior lending manager for Anglo Irish Bank, is also a director of Edinburgh-based Urbicus.
Other investors have also backed the deal led by Urbicus and Elliot, which is controlled by Wall Street billionaire Paul Singer. RBS was owed about £300m when the assets of the Glanmore Property Fund were frozen on fears it faced a drastic collapse in value.
The Dublin-listed fund, managed by Tilney Asset Management, part of Deutsche Bank’s wealth management division, was worth close to £1 billion when investors were barred from redeeming their investments in 2008.
A re-valuation of the fund’s asset in June saw its value collapse from £578m to £385m after it had already made sales in efforts to keep up loan repayments.
At the start of the year, the fund had around £350m of debt held against it, including £260m owed to RBS.
In January, lenders RBS and Cana- agement overstretch in other areas of the organisation, whose businesses range from food to pharmacies and funerals; but he did not agree with the Co-op bank’s chief executive Neville Richardson, now departed, that there was a risk of overstretch in the financial division – 40 per cent of the mutual. That was a bad call.
Despite this disagreement, Marks was undaunted by his subordinate’s concerns. He decided to press ahead da Life agreed to extend loans to the open-ended trust until 2015 and 2014, respectively.
The deal with Urbicus marks an exit for RBS ahead of the loan extension. It is thought that Urbicus would not have paid a large discount on the value of the debt as equity in the fund is estimated to be slightly higher than the value of the loans.
The deal was not thought to include the £60m debt held by Canada Life.
As at 31 July, the Glanmore fund owned 39 assets.
Property consultancy CBRE was appointed in July to sell off another portfolio of properties owned by the fund, which was dubbed “project tiger”.
The portfolio is thought to be made up of ten office buildings, three industrial assets and two retail assets, including: the Icon, an office building in Stevenage, Apex House, an office block in Birmingham, and an Eddie Stobart industrial unit in Yorkshire.
A spokesman for Urbicus said: “We can confirm Urbicus, with the backing of a number of investors, has acquired the debt of Glanmore Property Fund, and is now acting as lender.”
He said the “project tiger” sale was “not as a result of a change of lender, but that the fund continues to operate as before”.
Urbicus was established in 2011 to acquire and manage property-backed loan portfolios. Its first deal was in 2011, when it bought the £300m Scottish loan book of Anglo Irish.
According to magazine Forbes, Singer is estimated to be worth $1.3bn and his hedge fund oversees $21bn
in assets. TWO energy deals worth more than $100 million (£62m) in total were unveiled yesterday, with EnQuest buying North Sea assets from Centrica and Dart Energy selling a stake in some of its onshore licences to GDF Suez.
EnQuest, which was spun out from energy services giant Petrofac in 2010, bought the Greater Kittiwake assets – which include the Gadwall, Goosander, Grouse, Kittiwake, and Mallard fields – from Scottish Gas-owner Centrica for $39.9m and took on $5.1m of debt.
The FTSE 250 driller will pay Centrica an extra $30m if it gets regulatory approval to tie its Crathes and Scolty fields back to Greater Kittiwake. The deal also includes the Kittiwake to Forties oil export pipeline.
Meanwhile, Dart Energy – the Australian-listed explorer that wants to drill for coal-bed methane near Falkirk – has sold a 25 per cent stake in 13 of its licences in England and Wales to French power giant GDF Suez for $39m.
GDF Suez will hand over $12m in cash and will pay for up to $27m of tests to establish if shale gas can be extracted from four of the sites and coal-bed methane (CBM) from ten locations.
Dart’s licences in Scotland – which include plans to drill for coal-bed methane near Falkirk and sites in Dumfriesshire and Fife – are not included in the deal, which marks GDF Suez’s entry into the UK’s onshore gas extraction market. l Aberdeen-based energy services firm Wood Group has secured a “multi-million dollar”, five-year contract from Talisman Sinopec Energy UK to maintain 22 Siemens Ruston gas turbines on the Buchan, Clyde, Flotta and Tartan rigs in the North Sea. THE resurgent Scottish textiles industry has ripped through targets seven years ahead of schedule and is now tipped to hit global sales of £1.5 billion by 2020.
The industry has reached £950 million in annual sales, surpassing the £846m target for 2020, which was set out in the Scottish Government’s textiles industry strategy in 2011.
The figures were revealed at a summit yesterday in Hawick, where the Scottish Government announced a series of industrysupport measures, including giving £120,000 to the Scottish Textiles & Leather Association (STLA) to undertake “key infrastructural or developmental actions” over the next six months.
The Scottish Government also endorsed plans, also led by the STLA, to establish a £4m “centre of excellence” for the industry at the Heriot-Watt University campus in Galashiels.