The fund trying to buy mortgage bonds insured by Syncora Guarantee Inc. to relieve the bond insurer’s exposure to risky structured deals extended the deadline for its tender offer on Thursday for the second time this week.
The new deadline is 11:59 p.m. Friday.
BCP Voyager Master Funds SPC Ltd., acting on behalf of the Distressed Opportunities Master Segregated Portfolio, in March offered to purchase from bondholders 56 residential mortgage-backed securities insured by Syncora with a face value of $5.9 billion.
The idea was to reduce the money Syncora needed to commit to cover expected losses on these insured bonds.
The fund postponed the deadline — which was originally March 24 — 10 times, as recently as Monday.
The fund purchasing the securities said it has reached agreements for tendered RMBS with a total of 54.7 “remediation points” — an abstract term the company uses to describe the amount of potential claims losses taken off its books by buying insured bonds. Syncora is targeting 72 remediation points to complete the deal.
Syncora provided a list of bonds that have been tendered, the principals of which summed to $2.33 billion.
The deal is one part of a project to restructure the company’s insured portfolio to bring its policyholders’ surplus — or the amount by which an insurer’s assets exceed liabilities — into regulatory compliance.
New York State requires a policyholder’s surplus of $65 million. The company most recently reported a policyholder’s deficit of $3.8 billion.
The idea behind the RMBS deal is that if Syncora does not insure the bonds anymore, it does not have to maintain a reserve to cover potential losses from claims on the debt.
Reserves sap money out of assets, thereby reducing policyholder’s surplus.
Taking the bonds off the company’s insured book would free up those reserves, contributing to assets and policyholder’s surplus.
Syncora insured $133.7 billion in debt at the end of last year, including $52.4 billion in munis.
