On Friday, NLB announced that it has successfully closed the process of legal merger of N banka d.d. with NLB d.d.

As reported by the Company, the legal merger is one of the final steps of the integration of N banka with NLB. This process started all the way back in March 2022, when due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions against Russia, and specifically, Sberbank, its subsidiaries across Europe were under threat of liquidity issues. In order to protect the customers of these banks in Europe, and in this case in Slovenia, a decision was made to allow NLB to acquire the Sberbank subsidiary in Slovenia, which would mean it could stabilize the bank’s operations, and allow the bank’s customers to regain access to the funds on their accounts.

As such, NLB signed a sales agreement with the Single Resolution Fund to acquire a 100% share in Sberbank d.d., which was subsequently renamed to N banka. Due to the nature of the agreement, NLB ended up with EUR 172.8m of negative goodwill in 2022, which boosted its net income significantly during the period.

Since then, NLB has been working on integrating N banka with NLB, and this latest step refers to Friday’s entry of the legal merger in the Register of Companies, with the operational integration to follow this weekend.

NLB share price (2020 – 2023 YTD, EUR)

Source: LJSE, InterCapital Research