German lender Hypo Real Estate has struck a last-minute deal with a consortium of banks for credit to resolve a refinancing squeeze that it faced, the group said today.
Its shares had tumbled 75.5 per cent in early trade today.
The most recent figures available suggest that Hypo Real Estate, which acquired Dublin-based public finance provider Depfa Bank last year, employs around 180 people in Dublin. At the time of the takeover Depfa employed 300 people at its headquarters in the IFSC.
Hypo Real Estate, which lends money for property projects and to governments, had been examining measures including the sale of assets such as loan portfolios to circumvent the financial sector squeeze, sources said.
Early today emergency talks resulted in a group of German banks, providing a multi-billion euro short-term and mid-term credit facility sufficient to cover Hypo's funding needs well into the future.
Hypo Real Estate did not name the banks or say how much of a loan it got, but a source familiar with the situation told Reuters it had secured a credit line of up to €35 billion ($51.21 billion) from a consortium of listed and public-sector banks in Germany.
The accord means the lender had secured financing until the end of 2009, the source said.
Hypo Real Estate declined further comment.
"Hypo Real Estate Group will not need to go back to the unsecured money market for its refunding in the foreseeable future," chief executive Georg Funke said in a statement.
As a result of the arrangement, Hypo would have to impair the goodwill of its holding in Depfa Bank, which would have a significant effect on Hypo's profit and loss statement, it said.
There would be no dividend for its shareholders this year as well as writedowns on the book value of part of its business, it said.
Germany's central bank, or Bundesbank, which had been involved in the discussions, said the agreement should guarantee the viability of the group.
Hypo, which lends to such borrowers as Italy, Japan, Tokyo and Istanbul, had been especially vulnerable to the freeze in interbank lending, which worsened after the collapse of Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers.
Unlike its bigger rivals such as Commerzbank, Hypo does not have any customer deposits to fall back on as banks grow increasingly reluctant to lend to one another.
Hypo relies on this interbank market to borrow as well as on money lent by Germany's central bank to refinance roughly €50 billion annually, according to a company figure released earlier this year.
Most of the demand for the short-term unsecured refinancing comes from Hypo's business of lending to governments, who often require help bridging temporary holes in their budgets.