The assets of Upruc UTCH - put up for sale at a 25% discount

The Administration of Public Finance for Medium Sized Taxpayers of Braşov will auction off six assets of the company Upruc UTCH Făgăraş on October 21st. The auction will start at approximately 3.8 million lei for all the assets, 25% below the starting price for the auction which was held last month (5.1 million lei), which ended unsuccessfully. The six assets - which include the administrative building, a storage building, the heavy machinery hangar, the manual forge hangar, the hangar for embossed parts and the mould warehouse - will be sold off together with the pertaining land, which has a total surface of 1.2 hectares.

The company of Făgăraş was once again put up for privatization at the end of 2009. In February 2010, the company Electric Comat SRL, owned by Ana Maria Dumitrescu, the lawyer that represented the former shareholder of the company Grigore Bica, in his lawsuit against AVAS won the call for bids. The company was first privatized in 2003, with the majority stake being acquired by Făgăraş businessman Grigore Bica, who offered 350,000 Euros.

After five years in which the company"s activity generated over 1 million Euros in arrears to the state budget, the AVAS (Authority for State Assets Recovery) filed a lawsuit challenging the sale of stock which happened in 2003, based on clauses in the privatization contract, and regained ownership of the company. The problem seems to be that Electric Comat SRL doesn"t have the financial resources needed to pay up the debts to the state budget that UPRUC has racked up, which is why the Tax Administration is now trying to sell of the assets of the latter to recover some of these debts.