Mon Jul 15, 2013 10:38am EDT
* Estado report says BNDES favored EBX by stretching terms
* BNDES might have incurred heavy losses in two loan deals
* BNDES disputes newspaper account, no immediate EBX comment
SAO PAULO, July 15 (Reuters) - Brazil's state development bank BNDES eased loan contract terms with billionaire Eike Batista's Grupo EBX, including stretching out payments, daily newspaper O Estado de S.Paulo said on Monday, citing documents provided by a lower house lawmaker.
BNDES disputed the Estado account of the loans and said Batista did not receive preferential treatment.
According to the newspaper, between January 2009 and December 2012, BNDES committed 10.7 billion reais ($4.7 billion) in credit to EBX, a mining, energy and logistics conglomerate, Estado said, citing the documents.
The bank offered the loan contracts at below-market interest rates and asked for collateral such as company stock or goods that had not been bought yet, the paper added.
But a BNDES spokesman told Reuters: "The terms of the contract between Batista-run companies were not in any way different from standard BNDES practice. Contrary to what the Estado report insinuates, he was given no advantages whatsoever and received the same treatment as any other client of the bank."
Most of the loans extended to the EBX companies, many of them listed on the São Paulo Stock Exchange, will not mature until the next decade, Estado said, citing the documents. Rio de Janeiro-based BNDES is Brazil's only source of long-term loans for the nation's companies.
A spokeswoman for EBX in Rio de Janeiro was not immediately available to comment on the Estado report.
According to Estado's calculations, BNDES may book as much as 462 million reais in losses if it decides to unwind two transactions allowing MPX Energia SA to replace debt with equity. Batista recently sold control of MPX Energia to Germany's E.ON SE.
"The government needs to explain the profit the country obtained with all these transactions," said lower house lawmaker Cesar Colnago, who asked the BNDES for detailed information on its dealings with Batista's EBX a few months ago. "They look like business dealings made between a father and his son."
Colnago is a lawmaker with the opposition Brazilian Social Democracy Party, or PSDB.
Earlier this month, BNDES said current loan commitments to EBX totaled 10.4 billion reais, but did not say how much of that amount has been disbursed, citing the need to preserve banking secrecy rules in Brazil.
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