Bulletin: Iceland-Based Arion Bank Ratings Unaffected By Announcement Of Potential IPO

MADRID (S&P Global Ratings) May 22, 2018--S&P Global Ratings said today that its ratings and outlook on Iceland-based Arion Bank (Arion, BBB+/Stable/A-2) are not immediately affected by the announcement of a potential IPO. Arion intends to list its shares on both Nasdaq Iceland and Nasdaq Stockholm in the coming weeks, subject to regulatory and market conditions. While the size of the offering has not been decided, the process will only affect existing shares of the largest shareholder Kaupskil ehf. and, possibly, Attestor Capital, which currently own 55.6% and 12.4% of Arion, respectively. The bank is targeting to float at least 25% of its shares. We do not anticipate the offering to result in any meaningful changes of the bank's strategic

...MADRID (S&P Global Ratings) May 22, 2018--S&P Global Ratings said today that its ratings and outlook on Iceland-based Arion Bank (Arion, ###+/Stable/A-2) are not immediately affected by the announcement of a potential IPO. Arion intends to list its shares on both Nasdaq Iceland and Nasdaq Stockholm in the coming weeks, subject to regulatory and market conditions. While the size of the offering has not been decided, the process will only affect existing shares of the largest shareholder Kaupskil ehf. and, possibly, Attestor Capital, which currently own 55.6% and 12.4% of Arion, respectively. The bank is targeting to float at least 25% of its shares. We do not anticipate the offering to result in any meaningful changes of the bank's strategic focus and stable risk appetite. Moreover, although Arion has been guiding that it will undertake a capital optimization that would reduce its relatively high common equity Tier 1 ratio (23.6%, as of March 2018), we still consider that the bank's capitalization...

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