Credit Suisse Group AG plans to liquidate its ?6bn German property mutual fund after investors tried to withdraw more money than the fund has available. Credit Suisse Asset Management opened CS Euroreal for redemptions on May 9 after the fund had been frozen for the past two years.
CS Euroreal will be wound up within five years, the Zurich- based bank??s German property-management unit said in a statement today. Two weeks ago, SEB Asset Management AG said it will liquidate a real-estate fund of about the same size because it couldn??t meet demand for repayments.
??Redemption requests greatly exceeded the original forecasts,? Karl-Heinz Heuss, head of the Credit Suisse unit, said today in a statement. CS Euroreal had raised 1.6 billion euros in cash to cover repayments, he said.
Since the global recession that ended in 2009, German real- estate open-ended funds have struggled to meet redemption requests, leading seven to be dissolved. Several more, including a fund owned by UBS AG (UBSN), Switzerland??s biggest bank, face deadlines this year to reopen or liquidate.
CS Euroreal and SEB ImmoInvest (SEBIMMO) are the largest of these funds. The remaining frozen funds hold less than 500 million euros each, mostly invested by institutions.
