Brazilian banks turn up heat on scandal-hit Odebrecht

Banks are raising the heat on Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht SA to put its house in order after months of treating the scandal-hit company with kid gloves because of fears its collapse could hurt their balance sheets, sources said.

Odebrecht has agreed to accelerate asset sales as part of a deal with creditor banks to let the heavily indebted company keep $800 million from the divestiture of its water and waste unit announced last month, enough to fund its cash needs for two years, according to several executives, bankers and lawyers involved in the talks.

The conglomerate also agreed to surrender to creditors all dividends from its crown jewel, petrochemicals unit Braskem SA (BRKM5.SA), and to place more assets as collateral for loans under renegotiation, said the people, who asked not to be named because the terms of the agreement with creditors were not made public.

"All the parties agreed that steps to resolve this drama once and for all must be taken carefully but quickly," said one of the people involved.

The agreement shows how creditor banks holding a big chunk of Odebrecht's 76 billion reais ($24.34 billion) in outstanding debt are growing increasingly assertive.

In part, banks' new-found confidence stems from a plea deal struck by Odebrecht in December with U.S., Brazilian and Swiss prosecutors, which drew a line under the main legal risks to the group.

Odebrecht and Braskem admitted to bribing officials in 12 countries, mostly Latin America, and agreed to pay $3.5 billion in fines in return for freedom from prosecution.

Lenders also feel they have given Odebrecht enough time and have dealt with other headaches in their credit portfolio over the last year, giving them more room to maneuver.

"Now the leniency deal is a reality, we believe that Odebrecht can downsize assets and liabilities at a faster pace," one senior banker said.

The tougher stance is evident from how banks are dealing with Odebrecht's 38 percent stake in Braskem, Latin America's No. 1 petrochemical firm.

While Chairman Emilio Odebrecht wants Braskem to lead the group's recovery, bankers believe they have the right to decide the fate of the stake - pledged as collateral for a debt restructuring of agribusiness unit Odebrecht Agroindustrial SA.

"It should be up to us, not Odebrecht, to decide what to do with Braskem," said the chief executive officer of a large Brazilian lender.

HIT BY SCANDAL, RECESSION

Once the nation's biggest employer, Odebrecht has been floored by Brazil's "Operation Car Wash" investigation into political kickbacks on state infrastructure contracts. Brazil's harshest recession on record has compounded problems for the family-owned group.

Restricted access to capital and a tarnished reputation led Odebrecht to miss a 12 billion-real asset sale goal for mid-2017.

The target has been extended until next year under the accord governing April's sale of Odebrecht Ambiental SA.

However, Brazil's government has joined creditors in pushing for the bulk of the target to be completed this year, officials, bankers and lawyers familiar with the restructuring told Reuters.

Some banks have balked at how slowly the Odebrecht family, which retains control over the company it founded in 1944, is selling shipbuilding, biofuels and oil drilling assets. Others question whether the family should retain command after its role in the corruption scandal.

In a statement to Reuters, Odebrecht said it is pursuing the downsizing, noting that gross revenue fell to around 90 billion reais ($29 billion) last year. The group declared gross revenues of 132.5 billion reais in 2015.

"After reaching agreements with judicial authorities in Brazil, U.S., Switzerland and Dominican Republic, the group is working to sign similar deals with other countries to take the group to a new standard of ethics, governance and transparency."

On Friday, Odebrecht named Luciano Guidolin, who played a key role in negotiating the plea deals, as its new chief executive officer.

Yet revelations that Odebrecht bribed politicians across Latin America have complicated efforts to win new contracts.

The backlog for civil construction unit Odebrecht Engenharia & Construção SA shrank 50 percent over two years to December 2016 to $17 billion, the lowest since 2008, according to preliminary financial data seen by Reuters.

Emilio Odebrecht has created stricter compliance structures and vowed to keep family members out of the group's boardrooms.

A person familiar with Odebrecht SA's finances said management agreed to book all of December's fine in last year's income statement, alongside heavy asset writedowns and charges related to the bribery scheme.

That would lead to the group posting a record loss, to be announced in the coming weeks, the person said.

The question is whether the company can rebuild its order book after it was banned from bidding on Brazilian public works contracts and shown the exit from at least four other Latin American countries.

Several top Brazilian officials are lobbying antitrust and auditing agencies to avoid additional penalties.

"I've seen many people spreading the word that Odebrecht will not survive, but that goes against this whole idea of designing leniency deals," said Carlos Lima, a prosecutor in the Car Wash taskforce. "We want the company working and we want it clean."

Source: Reuters

Customers pile in, analysts fret as U.S. banks offer rich card awards

Morrie Low, a 27-year-old Seattle cocktail server, has found an unlikely new source of pleasure: credit card companies.

After working off card balances he built up during college, Low started collecting new cards in May specifically to reap the increasingly lucrative travel awards banks are offering to encourage spending on their cards.

In August, Low snagged a new Sapphire Reserve card, from JPMorgan Chase & Co, which has become a magnet for millennials willing to pay the $450 annual fee for a sign-up bonus worth as much as $1,500 in travel, plus $300 in annual spending credits and more freebies.

Now Low is planning a trip to Germany with his girlfriend on JPMorgan’s dime. "I have never been to Europe, so that is something pretty cool about this hobby," he said.

The Reserve card opens up a new front in the war among banks to build up their lucrative credit card businesses. While it may be fun for customers, investors and analysts worry that battle will eat away the fat profit margins that made the sector so attractive to banks in the first place.

"You have five or six big national players and they are going around killing one another," said Chris Kotowski, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co.

METAL CARDS RUN OUT

Low illustrates the problem. JPMorgan won't know if he will become a profitable customer for another year because the up-front rewards are so great. He may drop the Reserve card before the next annual fee. He has already acquired two more cards and now is spending on those to meet their requirements for more sign-up bonuses.

And he doesn’t intend to borrow on his cards. That could be bad for JPMorgan because credit card companies historically have made about three-fourths of their revenue from interest. The rest has come from fees, which are being whittled away by the rising costs of the givebacks.

Still, JPMorgan executives say they are thrilled that many more young people applied for the Reserve card than they ever expected. That's especially true with millennials - people who reached adulthood around 2000 - who are the next generation of depositors and borrowers.

"It has been a huge success," said Kevin Watters, the bank's chief executive for cards. The bank so underestimated the demand that it quickly ran out of its initial stock of metal cards and had to resort to plastic for a while.

To make money from the card, JPMorgan has to have the right mix of customer spending, annual renewals and borrowing with repayments, said John Grund, a partner at card industry consulting firm First Annapolis.

Marianne Lake, JPMorgan’s chief financial officer, declined to say how much card debt the bank needs customers to take on.

“I am not going to give you the details of our business case, but I will tell you that we obviously have a lot of experience in a number of different (card) products,” Lake told reporters on Friday after the bank posted results.

Historically, airline travel award cards have been successful, with about 50 percent of customers borrowing, said Grund. High-fee cards used by the wealthy have worked with less borrowing, but with less valuable incentives than the Reserve card.

CARD WAR

Like JPMorgan, Citigroup Inc also has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to encourage additional spending and borrowing on its cards.

The other two banks among the four biggest in the United States, Bank of America Corp and Wells Fargo & Co, have also been looking for more card business, but less aggressively.

Citigroup intensified the card war last year by giving retailer Costco Wholesale Corp such a sweet deal for running its Costco card that it took the business from American Express Co, which said the winning terms were uneconomical.

Citigroup said on Friday that its Costco deal drove spending on its cards to $73 billion in the latest quarter, 57 percent higher than a year earlier. JPMorgan said spending on its cards rose 10 percent to $139 billion.

The banks do not report clear and mutually comparable figures for actual profits from cards. But executives say cards are among the most profitable of any business, with returns on equity of as much as 25 percent, about twice banks' recent overall return.

Citigroup's Costco deal fueled a round of concessions by banks to renew contracts with other retailers, hotel and airline companies for co-branded cards. JPMorgan’s new deals with Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, online retailer Amazon.com and others, for example, will cut revenue by about $900 million annually, the bank said earlier this year.

Now, with the Reserve card, JPMorgan has “fundamentally changed the calculus for what makes a premium credit card,” said Sean McQuay, who tracks card offers at online personal finance website NerdWallet.com. Citigroup, he said, needs to respond with more givebacks on its Prestige premium card.

Citigroup Chief Financial Officer John Gerspach disagrees. The Prestige card is already a “strong offering,” he told reporters on Friday. JPMorgan, he said, has “a very attractive offer on the table right now. We will see whether or not that is sustainable.”

Earlier this month, American Express increased rewards on its Platinum card, the traditional leader among high-fee cards. American Express spokeswoman Charlotte Fuller said the move was not a competitive response, but a coincidental improvement for customers.

PERSONAL REDEMPTION

The intense competition over card rewards has its roots in the financial crisis of 2008. Post-crisis reforms reduced the profitability of other businesses such as mortgages and capital markets trading, encouraging banks to turn to cards for profits. And, within that business, the reforms pushed banks from people with lower credit ratings toward creditworthy customers who respond to incentives.

And lately, the banks have had the means to bid more for customers because loan losses have declined to record lows.

At the same time, cardholders have become more savvy about working the incentives.

Ivan Drucker, a New York City-based consultant to Apple computer users, recently used awards from a strategically managed mix of credit cards to travel in luxury to Finland.

Drucker, 46, said he borrowed on cards at high rates in years past, but he's determined not to do it again.

"For me, there's personal redemption in this," Drucker said. "They got the better of me. Now I hope to turn those tables."

Source: Reuters