The Fondo de Garantías de Instituciones Financieras (Fogafin), which is selling the bank, said that it wants to offload a 55% stake to a commercial bank that will take over the management of Bancafé. The other 45% of the bank will be sold through the stockmarket.
Fogafin said that it hoped that both local and international banks would be interested in buying Bancafé. The only stipulation Fogafin made is that the purchaser should have a decent record in the financial services business.
Bancafé was originally set up with resources from the Fondo Nacional de Café, a parastatal, which the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros ran for almost 50 years. The combination of a crisis in the coffee industry and a raft of problems hitting the financial sector at the end of 1990s prompted the government to step in and take control of state-owned banks. It wanted to merge them and restructure the sector in order to make it more efficient. The idea was to leave the Banco Agrario as the only state-owned bank.
Bancafé has been through the Fogafin mill. Its staff numbers have been cut from 7,000 to 4,200, and the number of offices pruned from 456 to 276. The last official balance sheet showed it with US$73m worth of capital and US$2.058bn of assets. It has around 1.5m customers.
End of preview - This article contains approximately 544 words.
Subscribers: Log in now to read the full article
Not a Subscriber?
Choose from one of the following options
