A Portuguese bank on the verge of collapse - what were they thinking?

[Свободный Ион]

That would have been the response of many newspaper readers this morning upon learning the New Zealand Superannuation Fund has lost nearly $200 million in taxpayers' cash on a "risk-free" loan it provided to Lisbon-based Banco Espirito Santo (BES) on July 3.

The loan - part of a US$784 million credit package US investment bank Goldman Sachs put together through its Oak Finance vehicle - was made exactly one month before BES collapsed and Portugal's central bank split the country's biggest lender into two, with one part holding the good assets and the toxic assets placed in the other.

@темы: link, Europe, economy