The shareholders of Fondul Proprietatea have to elect two new members for the Representatives Committee on April 26, as the terms of Mark Gitenstein and Sorin Mindrutescu, Oracle Romania country manager are about to expire. The committee supervises how Franklin Templeton manages the 11.6 billion lei (EUR2.6 billion) assets of the fund.
The only candidate so far is Mark Gitenstein, a lawyer by trade and former US ambassador to Bucharest between 2009 and 2012. He was nominated for a new three-year term by Newtyn Partners.
Newtyn Partners is the investor that together with private pension fund NN (former ING Pensii) requested that Electrica and Fondul Proprietatea reopen negotiations for the former to buy the stakes the fund holds in its subsidiaries. Newtyn Partners also owns 1.9% in Electrica, while information about its Fondul Proprietatea stake is not publicly available.
Gitenstein was first elected to the Representatives Committee in April 2013, when he was nominated by the City of London, the second largest shareholder of the fund at the time.
Fondul Proprietatea was established in 2005 in order to compensate the former owners whose properties had been seized by the communist regime and could no longer be given back in kind. Corruption among public servants, however, led to few of the former owners actually receiving stakes in the fund as compensation, as most of the Fondul Proprietatea shares ended up in the hands of foreign investment funds.
The fund’s largest shareholder now is US hedge fund Elliott Associates, which owns 20% in it.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)