Banca Agricola is getting ready for privatisation

Negotiations for Banca Agricola (BA) privatisation have reached the final stage, when fire department authorisations, software licences and the CASCO insurance for some of the bank’s cars are being analysed.

“We are working hard these days to finalise all the statistics requested by the investor,” Eugen Radulescu, Banca Agricola chairman, told Ziarul Financiar.

“We were asked minute details about the activity of the bank and its subsidiaries, including the fire department authorisation for all our 226 subsidiaries and the licence for the software used in the bank’s agencies and subsidiaries.

Moreover, we were asked to submit all the insurance contracts for the bank’s assets, which amount to several thousand. For instance, some of the CASCO insurance policies for Banca Agricola cars have expired in March, so we have to update them,” Radulescu says.

When asked if the privatisation contract would be signed this week, Eugen Radulescu said “it is quite possible, but I am not authorised to announce any date.”

Though the Government had previously announced that the privatisation contract would be signed by the end of this week, the deal is quite unlikely to be concluded so soon. While Romanian officials are in a hurry to finalise this transaction, Raiffeisenbank representatives are not so sure that it will be signed by the end of this week.

“Though huge pressures are being made for us to sign the sale-purchase contract this Thursday or Friday, we are not willing to do that without exactly knowing the bank’s real situation.

There are still several clauses to be negotiated, guarantees, principles, therefore we cannot afford to jump ahead, given the transaction’s high value. That is why it is rather unlikely for the deal to be concluded by the end of the week,” sources within the financial consortium interested in Banca Agricola told Ziarul Financiar.

The above-mentioned sources specified that a pre-sale contract, as speculated by the newspapers, was out of the question. “A memorandum, which obviously is no engagement for any of the two sides, may shape up this week,” the sources said.

After last weekend Government representatives had announced that there might be other bidders for Banca Agricola, Ovidiu Musetescu, the minister of the Authority for Privatisation, on Monday stated that the bid submitted by Raiffeisenbank and Romanian-American Investment Fund was the only one that was still standing.

“In this stage, when we are actually negotiating the sale-purchase contract for the main stake, we cannot talk about other bids and there is no disturbance,” Musetescu said.