BET index fall annihilates gains of BSE investors

The Stock Exchange witnessed a new abrupt fall yesterday, with the BET index dropping below last year’s level for the first time in 2006.
The BET index gauges the performance of the most important companies on the market and had managed to go up despite the downward trend of the Stock Exchange over the last few months. After yesterday’s 2% loss, however, it fell below the level at the end of last year by 0.5%.
The Bucharest Stock Exchange yesterday continued the decline that started in late February, which took almost every major stock on the market down this year. The BET index yesterday was pulled down by more than 3% losses of Rompetrol Rafinare (Petromidia) and BRD, as well as the 1.8% decline of the Petrom shares.
Ever since the beginning of this year the shares of Petrom, the largest company on the market, have shed 1.5%, while the shares of the other petroleum companies like Rompetrol Rafinare (Petromidia), fell 41%. Petromidia’s decline was made even worse by the charges brought against Dinu Patriciu, the majority shareholder of the Rompetrol Group and by the losses posted in the first quarter.
Among those to have suffered the worst declines are SIF shares, which dropped by about 30% on average. Their trend, brokers say, was what caused the rest of the market to go down. Out of the most liquid shares, the only ones that have been maintaining growth are BRD’s, the second largest bank in the system and the second most important issuer in terms of size on the Stock Exchange, yet their growth since the beginning of the year is now at merely 5%.
Brokers equate the Stock Exchange decline to two main factors. Firstly, unfavourable regional circumstances that have caused other markets in Central and Eastern Europe to suffer a downward trend. Second, an alteration in the rules regarding the maximum stakes investors may own in a SIF, which had been previously modified less than one year ago.
“It was a combination of factors. On the one hand, it was the global and regional context, and on the other it was the legislation on SIFs that led to a drastic fall in shares. Legislative stability matters a great deal to foreign investors and what happened with the SIFs was really disappointing to them,” explained Liviu Giugumica, head of BRD Securities, one of the most powerful brokerage firms on the market.
The main analysts on the market told ZF that the major decline of the Stock Exchange occurred against a global context, where all the markets, and especially the emerging ones sustained heavy losses due to migration of investment funds to fixed-income instruments, as a result of the euro and dollar rate rises. However, they added, the recent global events’ impact was compounded on the Romanian market by specific reasons, such as unclear provisions of the Fiscal Code draft about taxation of capital gains and the uncertainty surrounding the SIF situation due to the regulations of the National Securities Commission (CNVM) concerning the 1% cap.