BERLIN: German state-owned lender Depfa Bank plans to cut a fifth of jobs in its Dublin headquarters after it swung into a loss last year as it was put into wind-down.
The bank will eliminate 28 of 140 jobs in the city this year, said Andreas Henry, a spokesman for FMS-WM, the German ‘bad bank’ that took over Depfa in December under government orders.
Depfa swung into a €155m net loss last year from a €36m profit in 2013, according to the company’s annual report, published yesterday.
Depfa was bought by Munich-based Hypo Real Estate Holdings in 2007, a year before the Irish bank ran into funding issues after Lehman Brothers Holdings collapse. Hypo Real Estate agreed to sell the unit as a European anti-competitive condition of the group’s 2008 German taxpayer bailout.
The German government scrapped the sale in May, saying it would extract a higher value by winding down Depfa within FMS-WM.
The loss in 2014 came largely from a €36m charge as a result of the termination of a loan to an affiliate within the Hypo Real Estate group and as gains from buying back its own debt declined to €3m from €98m in 2013, Depfa said.
Hypo Real Estate had picked Leucadia National Corp, the investment firm run by Wall Street banker Richard Handler, and Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company as preferred bidders in April, two people said in May. The joint bid was €320m, people familiar with the matter said in June.
