Azerbaijan, Baku, 28 November / Trend , corr. I.Khalilova /The negotiations are being held with the largest Hungarian OTP Bank on sale of control packet of shares of the Azerbaijani Unibank, Eldar Garibov, the chairman of the Unibank Supervision Council, said.
"The share of minority shareholders hold negotiations with OTP Bank on possible purchase of the control packet of shares of the Azerbaijani bank," Garibov said. The negotiations have been held within a half of a year and will be completed soon.
Garibov excluded the possible affect of the global financial crisis on taking of the final decision on the deal.
"However, the preparation process to submit the document to the Hungarian Council of Directors for consideration is continued and the final decision is expected to be made soon," Garibov said.
Negotiations with the foreign banks Unibank conducts in connection with the
possibility of output from the composition of the shareholders of the European
Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRR) bank and of German investment
corporation DEG, managing packet actions with 15.2 percent and 8.3 percent
respectively. Under the agreements concluded with EBRR and DEG, since 2008, they
obtained this right. Potentially the packet of shares of institutes can be sold
to strategic investors or redeemed by the acting shareholders.
"World-known financial institutes and foreign banks demonstrate huge interest to the Azerbaijani banking market including French and American," Faig Huseynov, the chairman of the Unibank Board, said.
The Russian Vneshtorgbank is also amongst of foreign banks that showed interest to the Azerbaijani banking system, but shareholders of Unibank were not ready to sale their shares. (Vneshtorgbank was already given permission by the National Bank of Azerbaijan (NBA) to acquire control packet of chares from AF Bank).
At this stage Unibank preferred OTP Bank due to more attractive terms, which proposed to the bank on purchase of shares.
Independently from the course of the negotiations, a decision to double the authorized capital to AZN 30mln will be taken at the general meeting of Unibank shareholders on 11 December. By the size of the aggregated capital, which is formed at AZN 67mln, today bank takes the fourth places after the Internationl Bank of Azerbaijan, Pasha Bank and Standard Bank
"If a deal with the Hungarian bank does not take place,
negotiations will continue. Moreover today EBRR and DEG does not have task in
sale of shares, they can be present into Unibank how much they will want, but
they have policy of investment bank. They sell shares, when they will be
proposed with good money", the head of bank said.
According to him, EBRR and DEG are ready to enlarge their share in the bank to
49 percent in the totality and they do not have problems for increasing its
packet to the maximum level of minority packet.
On 28 November, the official currency rate is 0.8079 AZN/USD.
The correspondent can be contacted at: [email protected]