BTA Bank Capital Shortage Swells to $3 Billion, Regulator Says

BTA Bank (BTA), the biggest Kazakh lender before defaulting on $12 billion of debt in 2009, saw its capital shortage swell 13 percent last month amid plans to restructure for the second time in as many years.

The lender’s liabilities exceeded assets by 435 billion tenge ($3 billion) as of April 1, compared with a gap of 385 billion tenge a month earlier, the Kazakh central bank’s financial oversight committee said in a monthly report on its website. BTA’s assets shrank to 1.437 trillion tenge in March from 1.476 trillion tenge in February, the regulator said.

BTA is negotiating its second debt restructuring after failing to make an interest payment on its July 2018 dollar bonds in January. The bank halted all payments on $5.2 billion of its recovery units, which BTA creditors received as part of a restructuring accord in 2010 to get 50 percent of anything the lender can get from impaired assets.

The following table shows the one-month performance of Kazakhstan’s five largest lenders by assets, along with seventh- ranked Alliance Bank and 13th-ranked Temirbank, and their position as of April 1. The data from the oversight committee are in billions of tenge:

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Bank                 Assets     Loans    Provisions  Profit/
                             Outstanding              Loss
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Halyk Bank           2,485.6   1,341.7      332.8      10.90
Kazkommertsbank      2,444.3   2,319.1      845.0       0.43
BTA Bank             1,437.9   2,060.7    1,163.5      76.66
Bank Centercredit    1,071.6     804.2      132.7       0.35
ATF Bank               996.0     829.4      177.7      -5.94
Alliance Bank          533.0     536.6      246.8      -5.22
Temirbank              250.6     223.3      114.1       1.98
All 38 Banks        13,299.0  10,584.8    3,288.4      96.38


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To contact the reporter on this story: Nariman Gizitdinov in Almaty at ngizitdinov@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Voss at sev@bloomberg.net