Crushing victory for Tudor Ciurezu and his team at SIF Oltenia

Tudor Ciurezu, together with four other candidates for the Board of Directors of SIF5 Oltenia, have won new four-year terms each, following the elections held in yesterday's General Shareholder Meeting.

The meeting was very tense, with negotiations between shareholders taking place up until the last moment, according to several sources present in the General Shareholder Meeting.

The vote count seemed to take a long time, with some shareholders making jokes about an abacus being used. The 56.95% attendance represented a record for SIF Oltenia, and the candidates had to revise their strategies, because in order to get a seat on the Board, each one needed votes that cumulated over 28% in holdings, in order to ensure over 50% of the present votes.

"Betrayals were the order of the day", one shareholder in the meeting told us.

Nevertheless, all the seven seats on the Board of Directors were taken.

The shareholders of SIF Oltenia have elected on the new Board of Directors current board members Tudor Ciurezu (with 92% of the votes), Anina Radu (56%), Cristian Buşu (70%), Nicolae Stoian (53%) and Carmen Popa (51.65%), as well as Radu Hanga (55.84%), executive director of Group Strategy Coordination at Banca Transilvania, and Ana Bobircă (53.97%), proposed by investment fund Business Capital for Romania Opportunity Fund (BOF), controlled by Florin Pogonaru and Erste Bank, according to some market sources.

SIF5 drew the most interest, as it had sixteen candidates, but of those who were considered the most likely to get in, several failed to do so: the representatives of Swiss Capital (Sorin Apostol and Ioana-Valeria Avram), as well as Ştefan Filip, of the EBRD, backed by the BT Group.

At SIF Oltenia, the stake of the elections was the 6% stake in Banca Comercială Română that the SIF has in its portfolio.

The chances of selling the stake in BCR in good circumstances have had a positive evolution, says the management of SIF Oltenia, according to the 2017 strategy submitted to the shareholders for approval.

The main avenues of action for the 2017 strategy proposed by the management are: continuing the restructuring of the stock portfolio, investment policy, organizational development, implementation of corporate governance principles and the dividend policy.

As far as the stake in the Romanian Commercial Bank is concerned, the management of SIF5 states that it maintains its availability to carry out negotiations interested investors, as SIF Oltenia seeks to get a good price: "In the event of the such a negotiation being completed, we will summon the Extraordinary General Shareholder Meeting, in order to put up for the approval the transaction, as this stake exceeds 20% of the total non-current assets, less receivables.

We must remind that BCR ended 2016 with a high profitability, meaning that the prospects of selling in good conditions that stake have evolved positively".

• The proposals to distribute the profit of SIF Oltenia and to buyback its own stock have not been approved

The proposals for the distribution of the profit of SIF Oltenia and to buy back its own stock have not been approved by the General Shareholder Meeting.

The Board of Directors of SIF Oltenia SA had proposed to the General Shareholder Meeting two options for allocating the net profit of 2016. The net profit of the fiscal year is 101,271,376.81 lei, 0.89% over the one stipulated through the Revenue and Expense Budget of 2016.

One first option concerned the distribution of a gross dividends of 0.0815 lei.

The second option for the allocation of the net profit was a program to buy back up to 5% of the company's share capital.