The board of directors of Lombard Bank has submitted a bid for the 21 million shares held in the bank by Cyprus Popular Bank, saying that this would be “in the interest of the bank and all its stakeholders”.

The sale process was announced almost a year ago and is already under way but no details have been given of how many bids were received in all.

A clause has been added to the agenda for its upcoming annual general meeting on April 27, asking the shareholders to authorise the disclosure of financial information “to bona fide offeror(s)”.

CPB, then known as Marfin Popular Bank, acquired a 43 per cent in the Maltese bank in 2007, from Banca della Svizzera Italiana SA, Lugano and other foreign shareholders, for €48.3 million. Since then, the shareholding increased to nearly 49 per cent. Had it managed to break through the 50 per cent threshold, it would have triggered a mandatory bid in terms of the local Listing Rules, to purchase shares from the 1,300 Lombard Bank shareholders at the time.

In 2012, Marfin reported a €3.3 billion loss – mainly after taking a 60 per cent write-down of its Greek government bond holdings resulting from the financial crisis. After the bank collapsed, it was rescued by the Cypriot government, which took 84 per cent ownership and split it into a ‘good bank’ which merged with Bank of Cyprus, while the ‘bad bank’ and its subsidiares were sold off and shut down.

Lombard Bank reported €7.8 million in pre-tax profit for 2015 and €6.6 million for 2016. The bank had 1,478 shareholders as at March 7, 2017.