Lucian Anghel, the new president of the BSE

• A break after the break

Yesterday morning, the shareholders of the Bucharest Stock Exchange arrived at the Hilton Hotel, where the general shareholder meeting was scheduled to begin at 11 o'clock. The final negotiations were made yesterday, in the very lobby of the hotel.

In spite of their announced schedule, the General Shareholder Meeting began one hour late, only to be suspended for another half hour, as the voting bulletins had to be replaced. Lawyer Narcisa Oprea, a partner at law firm "Schoenherr", had requested that the general shareholder meeting be overseen by a notary.

Meanwhile, the BSE proposed a different notary, meaning that the shareholders had to choose between the two nominations.

"The current management delayed the beginning of the general shareholder meeting specificially to find its own notary", Narcisa Oprea said yesterday, during the meeting. Eventually, the notary proposed by Mrs. Oprea was selected, with 53% of the votes, which represented a sign that the majority of shareholders are on the side of the banks.

Later, the shareholders took several consistent breaks, since, after every vote, the manual counting of the votes required tens of minutes.

• Who were the candidates?

There were 20 candidates for the Board of the Exchange, of which the members of the former board would enter the competition by default.

After Grzegorz Konieczny, the manager of the Proprietatea Fund, was declared incompatible with the position of director of the BSE and had to abandon it, Franklin Templeton proposed Schroll Matjaz, executive director of "Templeton Global Investment Trust".

The shareholders who asked for the revocation of the board of directors and which together own 9.41% of the BSE are the pension fund managed by ING, the ING International Romanian Equity investment fund, SSIF Intercapital Invest, Ifond Financial, Unicredit CAIB, BCR and Erste Bank.

Their proposals for the Council of the Stock Exchange were Adrian Lupşan, deputy director adjunct "Intercapital Invest", Valerian Ionescu, head of trading and sales of financial instruments tradable on regulated markets at BCR, Ioana Tănase, managing director at "Unicredit CAIB Securities".

Eugen Voicu, the president of "Certinvest", who also owns 23% of "Intercapital Invest", also ran for a seat on the Board, together with Nicolae Gherguş, the president of "Confident Invest" and vice-president of the Association of Brokers; Galina Narcisa Oprea, a partner in law firm "Schoenherr", lawyer Alina Mioara Cobuz Bagnaru, currently a member of the Arbitral Chamber of the BSE, proposed by Alecsandrina Botez, Valentin Cismaru, the president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Vâlcea, proposed by SSIF Harinvest, and Robert Cosmin Pană, legal advisor at "Swiss Capital", proposed by an individual shareholder - Lucian Dobre. The candidates for the position of chairman of the board were Stere Farmache, Dan Paul and Lucian Anghel.

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Lucian Anghel has been working at BCR since 1996, and was backed by the bank for the position of Chairman of the Board of the BSE. He currently serves as chief-economist and executive director of the Strategy and Development Department of BCR and is a member of the Investment Committee of the BCR Pension Fund.