Covered Bonds
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In July 2013, Crédit Agricole Italia S.p.A. (formerly CA Cariparma SpA) started a programme for the issue of Covered Bonds (the Covered Bond Programme). This transaction, which is part of a process for effective management of funding sources, aims at providing the Company with a wider range of liquidity management instruments.
Covered bonds are debt securities issued by banks and featuring a dual-recourse mechanism, i.e. a double guarantee:- The main guarantee, consisting of the equity the bank issuing the Bonds (“Issuer”) and, in addition to it,
- The further irrevocable and unconditional guarantee, which is also independent of the obligations undertaken by the Issuer, given by a Special-Purpose Entity (SPE) that is part of the Group, on a pool of high quality loans transferred by one or more Transferor Banks. The transferred assets are separated from the Special-Purpose Entity’s assets and shall be used to the benefit of the covered bond holders and to the benefit of other parties in favour of whom the guarantee has been given.
In this transaction Crédit Agricole Italia (formerly CA Cariparma) has the role of Issuer, while the Transferor Banks, in addition to Crédit Agricole Italia itself, are Crédit Agricole FriulAdria S.p.A. and Crédit Agricole Carispezia S.p.A., the latter two being Crédit Agricole Italia’s subsidiaries and members of the Crédit Agricole Italia Banking Group. In this scope, on 20 May 2013, the three transferor banks signed three contracts for the transfer of credit claims resulting from residential mortgage loans granted to natural persons, with the Special-Purpose Entity Crédit Agricole Italia OBG Srl (formerly Cariparma OBG), which was incorporated for this purpose and is controlled by CA Italia.
In general, the transaction comprises three subsequent steps:
- Transfer of the credit claims (the aforementioned mortgage loans) by the transferor banks to Crédit Agricole Italia OBG;
- Issue of bonds by Crédit Agricole Italia;
- Use by Crédit Agricole Italia of the liquidity thus obtained to provide new loans to Customers.
In practice, the transfer of the mortgage loans does not entail any change for the related Customers, as the management of their bank relations remains with the reference branch, with all the terms, conditions, features and communications regarding the loan utterly unchanged. Within the Covered Bond Programme, the three transferor banks and the SPE finalized the transfers of residential mortgage loans on the following dates:
- 20 May 2013: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, no. 60 of 23 May 2013;
- 15 June 2015: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, no. 70 of 20 June 2015;
- 23 February 2016: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, no. 25 of 27 February 2016;
- 20 February 2017: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, no. 24 of 25 February 2017;
- 20 November 2017: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, no. 141 of 30 November 2017;
- 19 March 2018: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, no. 35 of 24 March 2018;
- 18 February 2019: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, no. 23 of 23 February 2019;
- 23 September 2019: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, no. 114 of 28 September 2019;
- 24 February 2020: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, no. 27 of 3 march 2020;
- 26 October 2020: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, no. 130 of 5 November 2020;
- 21 June 2021: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, no. 74 of 24 June 2021;
- 29 November 2021: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, no. 144 of 4 december 2021;
- 30 May 2022: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, no. 64 of 4 June 2022;
- 12 June 2023: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, n. 69 of 13 June 2023;
- 26 February 2024: the full list of the methods used to identify the mortgage loans to be transferred was published on the Italian Official Journal, n. 26 of 2 March 2024;