BRD vice-president cashes 200,000 euros for stake

On Friday, Petre Bunescu, BRD vice-president and the manager who owns the largest interest in the bank, sold a stake of 46,000 BRD shares on the Stock Exchange, for which he collected more than 200,000 euros. At the end of last year, Bunescu owned a stake of around 500,000 BRD shares, almost 0.075% of the bank’s capital, according to data published in BRD’s annual report. If calculated at the price on the Bucharest Stock Exchange on Friday, the stake was worth 2.28 million euros.
Bunescu received most of the shares he owns following the bank’s privatisation, when BRD employees were able to buy a stake of 8% at a price that was equal to the face value of the shares at that moment, of 2.5 RON/share.
Bogdan Baltazar, formerly the chairman of the bank, had been the biggest individual investor in BRD, with 0.1% of the capital. According to an annual report, Baltazar began to sell his entire interest in the company in 2003.
On Friday, Bunescu sold the stake at an average price of around 16 RON/share. He had previously sold another stake of 19,000 shares at a price of 15.5 RON/share on June 20.
This is the second such time in the past week that BRD stock has been sold by some of the bank’s managers. Last Wednesday, Maria Buga, the manager of the Major Corporate Customers unit also sold a stake.
Buga had collected more than 133,000 euros after selling a stake of 33,000 shares. She liquidated her entire interest in BRD.
Announcements about the sales conducted by managers of listed companies are very significant to Western capital markets, as investors and brokers are developing strategies depending on managers’ attitude to the shares of the companies they run.
On the Bucharest Stock Exchange, announcements of this type have become commonplace over the past year, as some CNVM rulings have enforced greater transparency. Most managers who have sold stock said that the sales had nothing to do with company activity, instead stating that they were performed in order to cover their needs at the time.
BRD shares on Friday posted solid growth on the Bucharest Stock Exchange, registering a peak of 16.3 RON/share, up 7.2% from the previous day. They continued to go up yesterday, increasing by 3.7% and closing at 16.9 RON.