EXCLUSIVE: SHOCK AND AWE ON THE STOCK MARKET Shares worth 200,000 Euros stolen from the broker account of the Chief of Mission of IFC Romania

Chief of Mission of IFC Romania, Ana Maria Mihăescu, was recently the victim of a theft of shares of over 200,000 Euros, and the case is already on trial in the Court of Sibiu.

The IFC is the investment division of the World Bank.

The fact that the incident happened to such a high-profile individual, would suggest that anything can happen on the Romanian stock market and that the Cristian Sima scandal and the accusations of fraud at Carpatica Invest, last year, haven't frightened anybody. Perfectly normal, since nobody ever gets blamed for anything, from brokers to the Bucharest Stock Exchange, the Central Depository, The Financial Oversight Authority (FSA) and the police.

Ana Maria Mihăescu lost over 900,000 lei (200,000 Euros) as a result of the actions of eight individuals, who used a forged identification card to trade shares which she owned on listed companies and to take the money out from her account.

According to a press release of the Prosecutor's Office of the Court of Sibiu, at the end of July, defendants Livia Galea, Bogdan Belu Koteleş, Nicolae Paul Macovei, Aron Hanţiu, Mihai Corcoveanu, Dorel Ioniţă, Ştefan Adrian Fleşer and Ioan Pungilă succeeded, "between February and April 2013, in misleading the officials of the brokerage firm, Actinvest SA of Braşov, whom they have persuaded, using forged identification, to sell the shares owned by victim M.A.M. (ed. note: Ana Maria Mihăescu), causing her a loss of over 900,000 lei, which the defendants withdrew from the banking center of Raiffeisen Bank specifically designed for such operations".

The prosecutors did not specify where the thieves got the information pertaining to the portfolio of the head of the IFC. In order to trade the shares all it takes for them is to be transferred from the Central Depository to the broker.

The case is on the docket of the Court of Sibiu, where yesterday, there was a new hearing, during which the court issued a decision to postpone the trial until the beginning of next month.

Also this week, the court of Sibiu has decided to keep three of the defendants in the custody of the court before the trial: Nicolae Paul Macovei, Daniel Ioniţă and Mihai Corcoveanu.

Ana Maria Mihăescu was unavailable for comments, while the officials of Actinvest refused to make any comment concerning this case.

Actinvest was ranked the ninth brokerage in the chart of the brokerage firms operating on the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE) at the end of last month, with trades worth 401.467 million lei, representing 2.82% of the total transactions. In August, the company intermediated transactions worth 75.194 million lei, which made it rank sixth.

The majority shareholder of Actinvest is American company Old Court Europe, which holds 72% of the share capital. Alecsandru Redeş holds a 11.4% stake, and the rest is owned by 54 list type shareholders, 19 companies and 35 individuals.

Over time, has intermediated several public secondary offers of the shares held by SIF Transilvania (SIF3) in various companies, as well as transactions with shares of SIF3 made by insiders.

Ana Maria Mihăescu has been leading the IFC since 1998. Since 2007, she has also been in charge of Moldova, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and starting recently, the Baltic countries.

In the 90s, she has developed the network of correspondent banks of BRD, and then worked on the international insurance of department of Eximbank, and in 1994 she joined the World Bank as a specialist on the modernization program of for the Romanian financial sector. She has been working in the local office of the IFC since 1997, which she joined after having previously held a second term at Eximbank.