The portfolio that the foreign lender sold were loans of the Vatika Group and Ballarpur Industries, they said.
Edelweiss Alternative Fund acquired the loans for ₹650 crore, one of the people said.Edelweiss Alternative Fund and Goldman Sachs did not respond till press time Friday to ET’s request for comment.
Vatika has missed payment to lenders since fiscal 2021, partly due to a liquidity crunch faced by real estate developers during the nation-wide lockdown because of Covid-19.
Last October, HDFC Ltd sold its ₹730 crore loan to Ares SSG Capital-backed Asset Care and Reconstruction Enterprises, as reported by ET.
Goldman Sachs had provided ₹610 crore to the Vakita Group in a combination of debt and equity. Of this, ₹345 crore was provided to prepay Piramal Enterprises loans, and the balance was to complete a project located on National Highway 8, ET reported in February 2020.
According to a credit rating report by Infomerics last year, Vatika had invested in various subsidiaries and group companies that were primarily land-holding firms. “Apart from investments in subsidiaries of about ₹385.33 crore as on March 31, 2021, Vatika has provided loans and advances to these companies aggregating more than ₹3,674.53 crore,” said the rating report dated March 23, 2022.
The company had a surplus land bank of 95 acres having a market value of ₹812 crore as of January 31, 2022, it said.
In its latest rating report dated December 23, 2022, Infomerics downgraded Vatika to ‘B+’ and tagged it as issuer not-co-operating due to non-submission of a no-default certificate by the company to the ratings firm.
It stated that Vatika had 11 ongoing residential and commercial projects with 692.23 acres. Of these, ten projects were in Gurgaon and one was in Jaipur.
Avantha Group-promoted Ballarpur Industries was acquired by Finquest Financial Solutions a year ago for about ₹700 crore under the corporate insolvency process.
