Metro Bank’s Biggest Shareholder To Sell Stake 

Gilinski owns 52.87% of the stake through his Spaldy Investments vehicle and enjoys the position of non-executive director on the Metro Bank board.  

British moneylender Metro Bank is once again making headlines after the bank’s majority stakeholder, Colombian billionaire Jaime Gilinski Bacal, expressed interest in selling his portion. Investors have already lined up to acquire a portion of this stake, according to Reuters news reports, which have confirmed this information from inside sources. 

Gilinski owns 52.87% of the stake through his Spaldy Investments vehicle and enjoys the position of non-executive director on the Metro Bank board. His decision to sell has been triggered by a rebound in the bank’s share price. Gilinski has been a majority shareholder of Metro after being instrumental in its 2023 equity recapitalisation of $436 million. 

Earlier this month, the bank’s shares reached a two-year high after news broke that a London private equity firm, Pollen Street Capital, could potentially acquire Metro Bank, which could result in uncertainty for customers and staff. This takeover could also have pushed the Bank out of the London Stock Exchange and back into private hands. This caused the British lender’s shares to jump by over 15%.  

Speculations also arose that Metro could be merged with another of Pollen’s companies, namely, the specialist business lender Shawbrook. However, all further postulations were brought to an end when Pollen Street Capital and BC Partners, which had also made a bid, withdrew after a disagreement on valuation, and Metro’s board rejected their offers. 

Gilinski also has the option to expand Metro by merging it with another bank and has expressed his faith in the bank’s potential for growth in the past. Upon his appointment as a non-executive director of the Board in 2024, he opined that his vision was to make Metro’s physical presence more customer-centric while also improving its digital capabilities, to set it apart from other moneylenders. To that end, the bank attracted scores of customers in recent years for its dog-friendly branches with seven-day openings. 

The Metro Bank deal is not an isolated one, as British banks have been in the news announcing a series of mergers and acquisitions. Nationwide Building Society announced in March that it would buy Virgin Money UK in a $3.7 billion all-cash deal, and is set to create the UK’s second-largest savings and mortgage provider. Similarly, in February, Barclays agreed to buy most of the banking operations of Tesco, Britain‘s biggest supermarket group, for $757 million. 

Since the 2023 recapitalisation, Metro’s shares have shot up 140% but are unable to reach the heights of its glory, having recorded 40 pounds per share in March 2018, according to LSEG data. In 2019, there was a major crisis at the bank with top executives and the founder resigning after shares took a nosedive following an accounting error. The company has since recovered, with the latest market valuation reaching 844 million pounds. 

Pollen Street and BC Partners also own British specialist lender Shawbrook, and if the Metro acquisition had not fallen through, the private equity firms could have considered a tie-up between the two banks. Shawbrook had also unsuccessfully proposed to buy Metro Bank in 2023. 

Launched by US billionaire Vernon Hill in 2010, Metro was the first high-street bank to open in the UK in over a century. It was set up with the aim of battling the UK’s incumbent lenders and, after a series of setbacks in the past years, recorded a profit in the second half of 2024.  

Metro is confident that its return on tangible equity (ROTE), which determines profitability, is set to almost touch the double-digit mark this year. Metro Bank remains hopeful that over the next two years,  over 2 billion pounds of its treasury investments could mature and offer higher yields. Therefore, given the bank’s uptrend, more investors could be lining up to take over Gilinski’s stake.