Shinsei wins $525m GE Japan loans

Shinsei Bank has bought GE Japan’s ¥65bn ($525m) real estate loan portfolio.

The portfolio is comprised of nine loans made on office and residential buildings mainly in Tokyo.

Shinsei said it had moved to purchase the loans soon after General Electric announced in April that it was selling most of its $363bn GE Capital finance division.

The bank has previously bought both Japanese and overseas real estate loans from GE and said it “considers its expertise and its fast, flexible operational capabilities in real estate nonrecourse finance to have led to its acquisition of the loan portfolio.”

Shinsei, which bought GE Japan’s consumer finance business for $5.4bn in 2008, is rebuilding its real estate portfolio. While the bank has accelerated disposals of its non-performing loans “in the light of the healthy real estate market”, it is also acquiring new loans.

It provided ¥418bn ($3.3bn) of commercial property loans for the year end 31 March 2015, an almost tenfold increase on the ¥44.5bn ($360m) reported for the previous period.

The Japanese bank, which has $74bn in assets, has been increasingly active in the UK real estate debt market.

Last week, it took a slice of the £210m loan which Lloyds Bank underwrote for Ping An Insurance’s £327m acquisition of Tower Place in London.

Shinsei also paricipated in a £440m loan to China Life for its purchase in June last year of Clifford Chance’s Canary Wharf headquarters. And it took a slice of ING’s  syndication of the £365m loan provided to the Safra family to finance London’s iconic ‘Gherkin’ in December.