Bulgaria's second-largest mobile operator Globul, owned by Greece's OTE, has acquired a third-generation (3G) mobile phone network license for 42 million levs ($27.76 million), OTE said yesterday. In a stock market filing, OTE Telecom said Globul received the permit from the Bulgarian authorities on April 25. Globul controls about a quarter of Bulgaria's mobile market. The country's dominant phone operator Mobiltel won a 3G license last month with a bid of 78 million levs ($51.6 million). Bulgarian authorities are expected to award another 3G license to BTC, majority-owned by U. S. equity fund Advent. (Reuters)

The Public Gas Corporation (DEPA) and Edison of Italy yesterday signed a memorandum with a detailed timetable for the Greek-Italian natural gas pipeline. It will form part of a network of pipelines carrying natural gas from central Asia to the Western European market. The pipeline will stretch along 600 kilometers (373 miles) from Komotini in northeastern Greece to Epirus in the northwest and another 220km (137 miles) below sea to Italy. Efforts will be made for its 950-million-euro budget to be subsidized by the EU's Fourth Community Support Framework.

Bulgaria's privatization agency said yesterday that Russian Unified Energy Systems and Greece's Public Power Corp (PPC) have submitted the highest bids in the sale of the Balkan state's three thermal power plants, Bobov Dol, Varan and Rousse, in a deal which analysts say could earn up to 250 million euros. «The agency will study the validity of the offers and will propose the winners in due course,» Atanas Bangachev, head of the privatization agency, said after the public opening of the offers. (Reuters)

The Athens Stock Exchange (ASE)'s website (www.ase.gr) is displaying for the first time in a standardized form a wide range of financial data of all listed companies as of December 31, 2004. These include changes in basic indicators, balance sheet data, the latest revised data, the average weighted number of shares for six consecutive fiscal years and additional information, such as changes in accounting principles, differences between published data and provisions, and loss of important clients and suppliers.

The National Bank of Greece is raising its interest rates on deposits from May 1, as follows: For balances of 1 to 1,500 euros, the rate goes up from 0 to 0.30 percent, for the 1,500-60,000 euro bracket to 0.50 percent, for 60,000-150,000 sums to 1.20 percent, and for balances above that 1.40 percent.

Greece's foreign exchange earnings from shipping reached 2.218 billion euros in the January-February 2005 period, against 1.902 billion in the same period last year, the Merchant Marine Ministry said in a statement.