Ceocea, SIF "Moldova": "If the five SIFs had negotiated with Erste together, we would have received a better offer"

Costel Ceocea, the president of SIF "Moldova" (SIF2), yesterday decried the lack of solidarity of the SIFs in their talks with Erste, and said that if they had negotiated together, they would have received a better offer.

SIF Moldova was not mentioned in the Agreement published on Wednesday night by Erste, but yesterday, the management of SIF2 announced that at 14:30, it received the letter concerning the "General Conditions for the exit of the SIFs from BCR".

Petre Pavel Szel, the president of SAI Muntenia, which manages SIF "Muntenia", said anyone can say at any time that the possibility of getting a better price existed, but he avoided commenting on the position of SIF2 "Moldova".

Mr. Szel denied the accusations of some of the shareholders of the SIFs that the management of the SIFs had negotiated with Erste to the detriment of the other shareholders: "A lot of work was needed to achieve version that was compliant with Romanian and Austrian legislation and which no third party could challenge.

With the exception of SIF "Transilvania", which theoretically has the option of holding an Extraordinary General Shareholder Meeting, we operated within the attributions that the Board of Directors has.

The employees of BCR own a total of about 1% of the shares of BCR and Erste can probably offer them a bigger amount".

In 2006, Erste offered to buy back the shares in BCR of its employees at a price of 6.5 Euros/share or to offer them six shares in EBS for a share of BCR.

However, the officials of Erste said that in 2006, things were different, than they are now. As an example, the exchange rate was 3.3 lei for a Euro. In 2010 there was another offer to buy back the shares in BCR.

The price offered at the time was obtained by multiplying the book value per share of BCR with a multiplier calculated by dividing the market value of BRD-SOC GEN by its book value, plus a 50% bonus.

"The offer made to the SIFs is completely different than the one made to the employees of BCR. In 2009, in the agreement with the SIFs, EBS agreed to make annual offers to the employees of BCR.

The deal that we are trying to make with the SIFs is different, it takes into account the current market conditions, but also looks at the long term outlook by having the SIFs become shareholders of Erste", the officials of Erste Bank said.

The agreement announced yesterday by Erste, also mentions the fact that the majority shareholder of BCR will continue to make annual offers to buy the shares of the employees of BCR, which made some of the shareholders of the SIFs to questions the motive behind including such an announcement in a press release concerning a potential deal between Erste and the SIFs.