The Hungarian bank OTP is reportedly interested in acquiring the Maltese HSBC Malta, a subsidiary of the British multinational banking and financial services company HSBC.
HSBC Bank Malta was founded in 1999. Since it is a publicly traded company listed on the Malta Stock Exchange, a lot of information is public about it. Its current market capitalization, as of 27 March stock prices, is around €550 million. In 2024 it brought in €206 million in net interest income and an additional €20.86 million in net fee income, which resulted in a net profit of €100.1 million for the year. Its total assets exceed €7.7 billion.
HSBC Malta has 12 retail branches across the Mediterranean island nation, and close to 3,000 employees.
The prospective sale of the bank is now ‘formally underway,’ as stated by an HSBC representative, according to the report by the Times of Malta. However, the Maltese bank also stressed that ‘there is no preferred offeror and that the process remains at an early stage.’ The information that the Budapest-based OTP Bank is the most likely bidder to close the deal also comes from the Times of Malta.
The local paper, however, describes OTP Bank as ‘controversial’, for having been put on the official war sponsors list by the National Agency on Corruption Prevention of Ukraine in 2023. However, after just a few months, the agency removed OTP from the blacklist, following the outrage by the Hungarian government.
This would not be the first time that a major Hungarian company fails to close an acquisition deal due to alleged ties to the Russian government. In August 2024 the Spanish government, led by left-wing socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, vetoed the buy-out of the Spanish train manufacturer Talgo by the Hungarian consortium Ganz-MaVag Europe for that very reason.
However, as of now, there is nothing to suggest that such an issue would hinder the deal between HSBC Malta and OTP.
Just like the Maltese bank, OTP is also a publicly traded company, leading to a lot of transparency between the parties. In fact, OTP currently has the largest market cap of all companies listed on the Budapest Stock Exchange, at 7.16 trillion HUF ($19 billion).
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