Richard Schenz: "The government should acknowledge the importance of the stock market"

• The Capital Markets representative of the Austrian government considers that a meeting between the stock exchanges of Bucharest and Vienna would be needed to reinvigorate the domestic capital market

Part of the measures implemented ten years ago by the Austrian authorities to help the Stock Exchange of Vienna recover can be adopted by the domestic capital market as well, to help reinvigorate it, considers Richard Schenz, the vice-president of the Federal Economic Chamber of Austria and the capital markets representative of the Austrian government for the capital market.

"In the beginning of the year 2000, the Vienna Stock Exchange was dead. We initiated resuscitation and after several attempts, we succeeded in doing so, following the implementation of concerted measures." (...)

I think part of those could be implemented in Romania as well, but the Government needs to be aware of the importance of the capital market", Richard Schenz said in a press conference yesterday.

According to him, the first three steps that should be taken by the BSE would be the creation of funds which would support the small and medium enterprises which are having trouble borrowing from banks, stimulating the development of the private pension system, which would support the capital market, as well as the listing of companies on the stock exchange by introducing a Corporate Governance Code similar to that of Austria, thus increasing investor confidence: "I think that these three measures, together with smaller ones, could help reinvigorate the Romanian capital market".

To this end, the Austrian officials said that a meeting between representatives of the Austrian and Romanian Stock Exchanges would be needed, and expressed his willingness to participate in such a meeting: "I would accept participating in a meeting between the representatives of the Stock Exchanges of Vienna and Bucharest, in order to stimulate the recovery of the Romanian capital market. It is important for a country"s economy to have a healthy stock market, which also strengthens the confidence of investors in the companies that are listed".

Richard Schenz also stressed that at the moment, the activity of the Vienna Stock Exchange has contracted, due to the world crisis and that the Austrian government is considering new patterns to help it recover: "We have proposed to the current minister of finance to support the creation of a fund to support the listing of small and medium enterprises, seeing how they have trouble securing loans (...)". The state of the federal Austrian budget makes this measure more difficult, he concluded, but he mentioned that supporting SMEs is important.