aid proceedings in return for tough limits on the size of the bank’s balance sheet and a one-off financial penalty of 500 million euros. Under the settlement, the bank was to pull out of asset-backed aviation finance and to limit property finance to its home market by 2014. It also included plans to reduce its staff from 3,300 to 2,100. For 2013, the bank presented its worst set of results since 2008, with an annual net loss close to 800 million euros. In 2015, Minister-President Torsten Albig of Schleswig-Holstein and First Mayor of Hamburg Olaf Scholz negotiated a restructuring deal with the European Commission that allowed HSH Nordbank to offload 6.2 billion euros in troubled assets – mainly non-performing ship loans – onto its government majority owners and avoid being shut down, saving around 2,500 jobs. The agreement stipulated that if no private-sector buyer emerged by 2018, HSH Nordbank had to be wound down. The European Commission approved a bailout in March 2016 and HSH asked investment bank UBS to find buyers for the loans which were extended to shipping and aircraft companies and for real estate and renewable energy projects. In an initial deal, Macquarie Bank and Merrill Lynch bought 800 million euros in aviation loans and 540 million euros in real estate credits, respectively. In 2013, HSH announced that it was taking provisions of 127 million euros in relation to illegal securities transactions, cum-ex dividend trades, after the findings of an investigatory report by the law firm Clifford Chance. HSH's involvement in cum-ex dividend trades were to follow the bank throughout the years up to 2017 Privatization, Lawsuits and the Return of the Cum-Ex Scandal 2018–2019 In mid-2016, the bank’s owners hired Citigroup to organize the process to privatize HSH Nordbank under European state-aid rules by the end of February 2018. Over the course of 2017, Apollo Global Management of the United States as well as Anbang Insurance Group,HNA Group and ICBC of China were considered as interested buyers but ultimately did not submit a bid for the bank. By the end of the year, bids were submitted by Apollo, Socrates and a consortium of private equity groups Cerberus Capital Management and J.C. Flowers. In February 2018, the state governments of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg – at the time led by Daniel Günther and Olaf Scholz – agreed to sell their shares for an estimated 1 billion euros to