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Former FinMin Vladescu discusses sale of BCR

Banca Comerciala Romana (BCR) would have not had any buyer in today's world financial context, and had the privatisation been delayed by eight months the price for the 62-percent stake in the bank would have been even smaller than two billion euros, former Finance Minister and head of the BCR privatisation board Sebastian Vladescu told daily Ziarul financiar in a statement carried on Tuesday.

The privatisation of BCR occurred in late 2005, after two abortive attempts in 2002. Back then, authorities would blame the failures on exactly the same unfavourable international context, as no strategic investor showed up when firm bids had been invited. Vladescu says that most of the consultants were very conservative in their estimates of the BCR price. He believes the sale of BCR was in the end a question of good luck, as the improvement by hundreds of millions of euros in the initial bid in the final stage was exceptional pure and simple. The privatisation resumed in July 2005 when the board received 11 letters of intent and completed on December 20, 2005, when Erste Bank was declared the winner on a 3.75-billion-euro bid for a 62-percent stake in the bank, which gave a final price of the bank of slightly over six billion euros. In October 2005, Goldman Sachs argued the realistic price of BCR should be 4.9 billion, which would have put at some 3 billion euros the value of the 62-percent stake. The sale of BCR generated almost 4 billion euros, but apart from the money, Vladescu argues, the sale proved that something huge can be done in Romania in a transparent manner without anybody having anything to complain about, and this mattered a lot in the eyes of foreign investors. After the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the International Finance Company became shareholders in BCR in 2005, the privatisation started off with 11 letters of intent submitted by KBC, Dexia, Deutsche Bank, Intesa, BNP Paribas, Fortis, Erste Bank, Millenium BCP, ABN Amro, National Bank of Greece and the US consortium of Citigroup Venture Capital and Texas Pacific. The interest voiced by Erste Bank, which previously had expressed an interest in taking over the CEC savings and loans bank, and the one expressed by ABN Amro came as big surprises, but the Dutch bank shortly after abandoned the race. The US consortium was also disqualified for having failed to meet the selection criteria. On October 17, 2005, seven of the initial banks - less so KBC and Fortis - submitted financial bids. BCR, Vladescu says, was the last bandwagon for European banking groups interested in Central and Eastern Europe that had missed on other opportunities to expand their business. The race ended on December 20, 2005, with Erste Bank in the victor's place. Sursa: http://www.rompress.ro

Tags: bcr euros vladescu billion privatisation cec euro

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