ING has agreed to sell its life insurance unit in South Korea to the country’s largest private equity group MBK Partners for Won1.84tn ($1.7bn), moving a step closer to divesting its Asian assets to pay back public debt.
The European Commission demanded that ING split its insurance and banking divisions and sell non-European assets as a condition of aid from the Dutch state during the 2008 financial crisis, which included €10bn in capital injections.
The bank has already sold most of the required assets, and is scheduled to finish repaying the state aid in 2015. It still has to find a buyer for its Japanese business, which cost it €98m in net losses in the second quarter of this year.