UniCredit and EIB Group, including the European Investment Bank (EIB) and European Investment Fund (EIF), have signed a new agreement to provide financing to Italian small and medium-sized enterprises and Mid-Caps. The operation is supported by the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), the main pillar of the Investment Plan for Europe.
In cooperation with the EIB Group, UniCredit SPA has finalized, with UniCredit Bank AG acting as arranger a new synthetic securitization of a portfolio amounting to approximately 2 billion EUR under the ARTS (Asset Risk Transfer Sharing) program and consistent with the new plan “UniCredit Unlocked”. The EIF will guarantee the mezzanine tranche of a portfolio of loans already granted by UniCredit to Italian small and medium enterprises, counter-guaranteed by the EIB.
The capital freed up from the securitized 2 billion EUR portfolio is then used to deploy 720 million EUR of new loans to support new projects carried out by Italian SMEs. The agreement signed is part of the broader framework of cooperation launched by UniCredit and the EIB to support SMEs in Italy. Over the last six years, UniCredit’s EIB resources for businesses in Italy have amounted to more than 4 billion EUR, with nearly 6 000 projects financed to date.
In May 2021, UniCredit and the EIB signed an agreement to mobilize 2.5bn EUR of investments in support of large and medium Italian businesses, helping them mitigate the economic consequences caused by the COVID-19 crisis. This was the first operation in Italy to be supported by the Pan-European Guarantee Fund (EGF), part of the 540 billion EUR EU rescue package approved in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Backed by the EGF, the EIB provided a guarantee of up to 750m EUR (75%) of UniCredit’s new loan portfolio, which, thanks to additional finance and the complementarity mechanism, will activate 2.5 billion EUR of investment.
Source: UniCredit Group`s press release from January 18, 2022
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