“We strongly believe the state assets privatization process through the stock exchange needs to continue despite the disappointing result of OMV Petrom’s secondary offering. We hope the government has learnt its lesson from the experience of this offering and that future offerings will be better structured,” Greg Konieczny, manager of Fondul Proprietatea and executive vicepresident of Franklin Templeton Investments, told ZF. Franklin Templeton Investments is the company that won Fondul Proprietatea’s management mandate. “We are willing to share our experience and our capital market expertise with the Government, advise and provide support for future offerings of state-controlled companies in the Fondul Proprietatea’s portfolio. We hope together we will be able to make such offerings much more attractive for local and foreign investors,” he added.
The offering whereby the Romanian government put up for sale 9.84% of the largest oil company OMV Petrom (SNP.RO), seeking to raise between EUR480 million and EUR600 million from local and foreign investors, ended in failure. Had it taken place, the sale of the 9.84% stake in Petrom would have been the largest share offering in the history of the Bucharest Stock Exchange. The failure of the Petrom offering raised fears on the local capital market that the rest of the privatizations scheduled of this year might not happen.
However, only a few days after the official announcement of the failure of the Petrom offering, Government officials publicly reconfirmed that the Romania would stick to the listing calendar. These messages were sent after meetings between the Government and the delegation of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Commission.