Nigeria's "bad-debt bank" AMCON posts 2012 after-tax loss of $5 bln

Nigeria's state-backed "bad bank" tasked with absorbing lenders' bad debts, AMCON, reported a 2012 loss of 822.9 billion naira after taxes on Wednesday, three years after it was formed in the aftermath of a financial crisis.

AMCON boss, Chike-Obi

It was a substantial improvement on the after-tax loss of 2.37 trillion naira that the Asset Management Company of Nigeria posted as of December 2011.
But the loss was still equivalent to around a sixth of the annual budget of Africa's second-biggest economy.
AMCON, which expects to conclude by mid-2014 the re-privatisation of three banks nationalised after a 2009 financial crisis, said in its financial statement that the lenders had a combined worth of about 100 billion naira, representing about 5.7 percent of its assets.
The bank was set up to absorb bad debts left over from a financial crisis that nearly bankrupted nine lenders until the central bank spent about $4 billion to bail them out.
It said it purchased about 10,000 loans representing about 45 percent of its 2.85 trillion naira worth of total assets.
AMCON said it had restructured half of its portfolio of bad loans and that about half of those restructured assets were performing. It said it had collateral for the non-performing ones.
The bank said it had 300-400 billion naira of its assets in real estate, and about 200 billion in equity of both listed and unlisted companies.
AMCON has said it will retire 2 trillion naira worth of bonds to cut its liabilities by 35 percent and repay bondholders in December 2013 with cash and treasury bills.
The bank is seeking prospective investors to buy 100 percent of Enterprise Bank, the first of the three nationalised lenders to be put up for sale.