State owners seal sale of HSH Nordbank to buyout groups Cerberus, Flowers
HAMBURG, Feb 28 (Reuters) - Germany's HSH Nordbank, formerly the world's largest ship financier, is being sold to private equity firms as it emerges from crippling writedowns and state bailouts amid the deepest sector slump on record.
The bank's state owners on Wednesday said that they sealed the sale to a consortium of buyout groups Cerberus and J.C. Flowers, with investors Goldentree, Centaurus and Austrian bank BAWAG also taking stakes.
The purchase price for 94.9 percent of HSH is roughly 1 billion euros ($1.22 billion), they said.
The buyers had been since mid-January in exclusive talks with HSH's owners, the German regional states of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg as well as regional savings banks. ($1 = 0.8184 euros) (Reporting by Jan Schwartz and Arno Schuetze Editing by Tom Sims)
