Financiarul

 

U.S. investment Cartesian Group based in New York purchased a 2.85% stake in Proprietatea (Property) Fund, put at about 100 million euros, to become thus one of the fund’s biggest shareholders, said participants in the General Meeting of the Fund’s Shareholders held at the end of last week.
Proprietatea Fund is seen as one of the biggest Romanian-based business in the next decade.
The fund has blocks of shares put at 4 billion euros when it was set up and it also has several other hundred million euros in cash.

 

Cartesian Group currently controls roughly 400 million shares of Proprietatea Fund, totalling a nominal value of 400 million lei (115 million euros). According to information in the market, one Proprietatea Fund share is traded at around 60% of its par value. Therefore, for such a price, Cartesian’s shareholding in Proprietatea Fund is worth some 70 million euros.

 

The Fund has in its portfolio 88 blocks of shares of some of the biggest Romanian companies among which oil company Petrom, electricity distributors, gas utility Romgaz, the Romanian Post, Transelectrica and Transgaz, with the acquisitions of shares in the Fund being a way to indirectly buy a diversified portfolio for an investor seeking exposure in the Romanian economy.
Proprietatea Fund is an agency of the Romanian Government set up in 2005. Its purpose is to provide the financial resources required to pay damages to the people that had their property seized during the Communist rule. The damages are paid in Fund stock representing the current value of the buildings that are not returned in kind.

 

Nearly half the Fund shares have been listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange since last November. At present, the total value of Proprietatea Fund shareholdings in the companies listed on the stock exchange amounts to 7.43 billion lei (2.13 billion euros).
The Fund made net profit in 2006 at 72.15 million lei (21.3 million euros). It had 3,006 individual shareholders in Nov. of 2007, accounting for 11.26% of the share capital.
The Fund’s share capital upon setting up was 14.2 billion lei (3.9 billion euros). Its original single shareholder is the Romanian state.