Victor Cionga, the new CEO of the Bucharest Stock Exchange

The Bucharest Stock Exchange has appointed Victor Cionga, managing partner at AZ Capital Inves-tors, as CEO, and he will now be awaiting for the validation of the CNVM.

If he receives the approval of the Romanian National Securities Commission, Victor Cionga may begin his work on September 1st.

"I feel honored at the proposal of the Bucharest Stock Exchange, and I have accepted it out of the desire to do what I can for the success of the company", Victor Cionga, who went on to say: "I am convinced that the BSE and the stock market players will do whatever is up to them for the development of the Romanian stock market, in a very difficult European context".

The BSE has announced last night that the selection of the new CEO was a complex and rigorous process.

At the end of last month, the Bucharest Stock Exchange was in advanced talks with banker Bogdan Patriniche for the position, but according to sources, he has turned down the compensation package which was offered.

Yesterday, the rumor began circulating that the Bucharest Stock Exchange was talking to Astridel Rădulescu, the head of the Supervisory Department of the Milan Stock Exchange, according to Giulio DiCerbo, the former board member of the BSE and of the Central Depository.

According to our sources, however, Astridel Rădulescu would have wanted more closeness to the London Stock Exchange, whereas the management of the BSE would have wanted an affiliation with the Vienna Stock Exchange.

After the failure of the previous negotiations, it seems that the selection of Victor Cionga was done in great haste, in two weeks.

Leadership Development Solutions, a firm led by Radu Furnică, was hired in March, to find a CEO for the BSE.

In March, Radu Furnică was saying that his personal ambition was for the new CEO to be Romanian.

Valentin Ionescu was dismissed from his position of CEO of the BSE, in November 2011, due to claims that he had failed to meet his contractual obligations. Previously, a group of shareholders had asked for the management of the BSE to be replaced, which happened in the beginning of this year.

• A short biography of Victor CIONGA

According to the BSE, Victor Cionga is one of the most experienced professionals on the Romanian market for financial services, with a very solid expertise in invest-ment banking: "The financial career of Mr. Cionga began in 1993, when he entered the Capital team, the first Romanian modern investment bank established after 1990 as a joint venture which had the EBRD, Wasserstein Perrella and two local commercial banks as shareholders, and he continued with Romanian American Enterprise Fund. In the beginning of 1998, Mr. Cionga became a member of the management team of Raiffeisen Capital and Investment (RCI), with the position of Deputy CEO, from which he was later promoted to the position of CEO of Raiffeisen Financial Advisors (RFAR). He led the RFAR until the beginning of 2004, when he returned to RCI, as Deputy CEO for the next three years.

In 2007, Mr. Cionga founded AZ Capital Advisors, a partnership specializing in counseling for mergers and acquisitions (M&A) becoming Managing Director of the firm, which he has been leading together with his senior partners, until today.

Mr. Cionga has worked on multiple mergers and acquisitions and has participated in several privatizations, both on the sellers' and on the buyers' side, as well as on several stock market deals. His most notorious M&A deals were Monopoly (1999, 2005), Continental Hotels (2007) and NetCity (2011). The main privatization projects were: the IPO of Transelectrica (2006), Sidex and Petrotub (2002), Siderurgica Hunedoara and Tepro Iaşi (2003). He has participated in the IPO of Flamingo in 2005; in 2011, he has led the domestic team of the consortium which won the mandate of the Petrom SPO from the Office For The State's Interests and Industrial Privatization

(OPSPI).

Mr. Cionga was educated as a physicist. He graduated the Physics Faculty of Bucharest in 1980. He has further completed his education with an EMBA, which he obtained from Washington University (Seattle, USA) and the Academy of Economic Sciences (Bucharest) joint EMBA Program, as well as with a multitude of training programs and symposiums, focused on investment analysis and investment banking (Raiffeisen internal programs).

Mr. Cionga has a passion for international rugby competitions and is extremely interested in history, which is why he followed post-graduate classes at the National Defense Council (6 months in 1997) and at the Higher National Security Council (4 months, in 2005)".