carlos slim

The Catalan company, which is the main bank operating in the Spanish market, will sell half of its shares in the Mexican GFI, the financial group owned by the billionaire Carlos Slim. Caixabank currently controls 20% of the GFI shares. The Catalan bank has confirmed it will sell 3.7% of GF Inbursa to Inmobiliaria Carso, which is also owned by the Slim family, for €387 million, corresponding to 250 million shares. With this operation, Caixabank will earn a capital gain of €33 million. Besides, the Catalan bank aims to sell another 6.4% of GIF shares to institutional and retail investors from Mexico and international markets. After completing both sales, Caixabank will control between 9% and 9.9% of GFI.

Spain’s largest bank presented its results for 2012’s first quarter. Barcelona-based CaixaBank has reduced its profits by 84% compared to the same period last year in order to immediately fulfil all the new financial requirements decreed by the Spanish Government in February. The Catalan bank has allocated €2.44 billion in provisions in the last quarter. CaixaBank’s CEO explained they wanted to concentrate their efforts in this first quarter. Besides, the bank’s President explained that despite Repsol-YPF’s episode in Argentina, they will carry on with their expansion plan in the Americas, with the support of Carlos Slim, opening new branches in Chile, Colombia and the United States.

The main Catalan bank allocated 1.953 billion euros for insolvencies and raised its core capital to 11.8%, 2.9 percentage points more than the ratio it had in December 2010. These operations made their net profit decrease by 16.6% compared to the previous year. Besides, CaixaBank announced that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim will quit its board to rejoin that of the bank’s industrial holding ‘Criteria CaixaHolding’. Slim’s seat will be occupied by former Chairman of Citigroup and the New York Stock Exchange John S. Reed.

The transformation of the savings bank La Caixa’s industrial holding, Criteria into the private bank CaixaBank is reaching the final stage. Criteria’s stockholder board approved duplicating the current stocks by issuing 300,000 convertible bonds. The new bank expects increasing its market share in Spain by 50% through business activity increase and new acquisitions in the period 2011-2014. The announcement is made the day after billionaire Carlos Slim bought 900,000 CaixaBank stocks.