CEO of OTP Bank has sold 0.6% of the bank's shares

• The amount of the deal - 26.4 million Euros

The chairman and chief executive officer of OTP Bank, Sandor Csanyi, sold 1.7 million shares of the Hungarian bank, worth approximately 7.8 billion forint (26.42 million Euros), representing 0.6% of the 280 million shares traded on the stock market.

Between June and July, several members of the management of OTP sold massive blocks of shares of the bank. The size of the trades made by Csanyi could cause other investors owning stock, bonds or foreign currencies to become more cautious, according to the Portfolio portal, quoted by Mediafax.

Shares of OTP Bank fell 9% on Friday. Deputy Prime Minister Tibor Navracsics recently said that the Government is reviewing a new relief program to aid foreign-currency borrowers. No details are known about this new program, but OTP could post losses of several hundred billion forint.

The worst scenario for all the banks, OTP included, would be for the debtors to be able to repay their loans at the exchange rate valid at the time they were taken out, and forcing the banks to bear the resulting losses. At the end of March, the mortgage loan portfolio of OTP was 801 billion forint (2.7 billion Euros), and almost 81% were denominated in Swiss Francs, with the balance of that amount denominated in Euros.

Portfolio estimates that OTP could post losses of almost 215 billion forint, (727 million Euros), which would amount to a haircut of almost 33%.

If banks, debtors and the state were to bear the cost of such a program equally, the losses of OTP would reach 72 billion forint (243 million Euros).

Worst case scenario, the profit of OTP would fall considerably. Analysts predict that the after-tax profit of OPT would reach 142 billion forint this year (480 million Euros) and 184 billion forint (622 million Euros) in 2014.

Prime minister Viktor Orban said in an interview for Wall Street Journal published on Friday, that the crisis taxes, including those for the banking system, may be maintained for another decade.

The press office of OTP told Portfolio that chairman Csanyi and his companies will use the money earned from the sale of the shares for his domestic investments, most of them in agriculture and food industry.

The largest shareholders of OTP Bank are Medget, Timur and Ruslan Rahimkulov (8.9%), MOL (8.6%), Groupama Group (8.3%), Lazard Asset Management (5.6%). Other smaller shareholders own 68.6% of the shares.

OTP is present on the domestic market through OTP Bank România, OTP Leasing România, OTP Consulting România, a company which provides consulting services to investors, local authorities and SMEs, and OTP Asset Management România, a company for managing investments.