The lender completed 14 more deals than any other bank in 2016, the data show. Deutsche Bank’s biggest single deals including selling 570 million euros of the debts for Corral Petroleum Holdings AB, a Nordic oil refiner owned by Saudi billionaire Mohammed Al Amoudi, and 450 million euros for Cirsa Gaming Corp SA, a slot machine and bingo hall business controlled by Manuel Lao Hernandez.
Hernandez started off running slot machines in the bars and cafes of Catalonia in the late 1970s. Over the four decades that followed, he built a gambling realm stretching from bingo halls in Mexico to a casino on Morocco’s Atlantic coast and amassed a fortune of about $2.4 billion, according to Forbes.
Deutsche Bank has enabled much of Hernandez’s empire-building. The lender provided a line of credit and arranged sales of billions of euros of high-yield debt since 2004 as Cirsa pushed into other continents, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
“Some banks were reticent about working with this type of product from a gaming company,” said Gerard Buera, treasury manager at Cirsa. “But Deutsche Bank was open to it.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.