• Financial sector: The creation of the 'superbank' and pressure from the regulator reactivate an 'express' merger between Unicaja and Liberbank

Unicaja and Liberbank take a small step towards their merger with the approval of their boards of directors to undertake formal negotiations and the hiring of different legal and financial advisers.

After both banks confirmed on Monday "preliminary" contacts with a view to a possible merger, the boards of directors of Unicaja and Liberbank have met this afternoon and

have decided to give way to the beginning of formal negotiations

.

To this end, they

have mandated external advisers to start the 'due diligence

'

phase

(legal audit), in which information will be exchanged and they will have access to their respective books.

The objective of both groups, as reported by EL MUNDO, is to close the operation quickly to position itself advantageously on the new financial board that will remain after this new round of mergers.

The first executives of both entities, who already studied the integration in 2019, resumed their contacts precisely after the announcement of the absorption of Bankia by CaixaBank.

Unicaja and Liberbank have appointed

PwC and Deloitte,

respectively, to prepare the audit, while the advisory firms and banks will be

Uría Menéndez and Mediobanca,

on the Unicaja side, and

Ramón y Cajal and Deloitte

, on Liberbank's side.

It so happens that they are

the same advisers who were given a mandate during the last attempt to merge both entities

, who resigned in May 2019 after not reaching an agreement on the exchange ratio, so it is expected that the audit process is shorter than the last time, when it took several months.

Once the 'due diligence' is finished, with all the numbers on the table,

the boards will have to decide whether to approve an operation

that would give rise to the

fifth largest entity by volume of assets

in Spain (the merger between CaixaBank and Bankia), by adding 108,826 million euros (63,002 million from Unicaja and 45,824 million from Liberbank, according to data from June 2020).

The combined entity would have a workforce of 9,972 employees (6,274 from Unicaja and 3,698 from Liberbank) and a network of 1,608 branches (1,029 from Unicaja and 579 from Liberbank).

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