Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross has shown that he is interested in Spanish bank assets during an interview on Bloomberg from Abu Dhabi.

Ross said that he was in in talks "almost every week" with representatives of large Spanish banks. "Maybe next year will be the year for Spain," he said. "We've been doing a lot of work in Spain. We've put a lot of time and effort into Spain but haven't put any money in yet."

Ross acknowledged that Spain must still go through the "catharsis of real estate".

"I don't know if it'll be another six months or another 12 months or whatever, but at some point we might very well do something in Spain," Ross said.

Ross described Spain as a very interesting country and touched on the difficulty of removing bad assets. "Bad assets are going to have to be removed from the banks," he said. "It's very, very difficult to have a bank simultaneously managing a huge amount of bad assets and trying to grow its good assets. It's just tough."

MG

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