In Brief
Tellas products and services available at post offices Hellenic Post Office announced yesterday it will sell the full range of services and products offered by new telecoms provider Tellas, a joint venture between Italy’s Wind and Greece’s power utility Public Power Corporation (PPC). Tellas, seen by dominant Greek operator OTE Telecom as the most serious rival to its fixed-line business after OTE lost its monopoly in 2001, began offering its products and services on February 3. It will offer fixed-line and Internet services to residential users and business clients with a view to capturing 17 percent of the Greek fixed-line market by 2006. Hellenic Post said in a statement that Tellas will be available via more than 1,000 points of sale throughout the country, a retail network that serves about a million clients per week. Tellas is also available via telecoms retailer Germanos’s 300 stores and PPC’s own 270 points of sale. Wind, Italy’s second largest fixed-line and mobile telecoms operator, and PPC teamed up in 2001 to vie for a share of Greece’s newly deregulated telecoms market. PPC lost its own power generation monopoly in 2001. Wind, jointly owned by multi-utility Enel and France Telecom, has a 50 percent plus one share stake in Tellas while PPC has 50 percent minus one share. (Reuters) Fear of war pushes up Turkey’s wholesale and consumer prices ankara (Reuters) – Turkish wholesale prices (WPI) jumped partly due to the negative effect a possible war in Iraq has had on the country’s currency, though consumer price inflation (CPI) was a touch less than expected in January. The State Statistics Institute said wholesale prices (WPI) showed a sharp monthly rise of 5.6 percent in January for an annual rate of 32.6 percent, while Turkish consumer price inflation (CPI) rose a monthly 2.6 percent in the same month to stand at an annual 26.4 percent. Core inflation, defined in Turkey as private sector manufacturing prices, rose a monthly 3.6 percent. Analysts said they expected prices to rise further in the coming months due to war fears. Turkey is working to lower CPI to a yearly 20 percent in 2003 under its $16 billion International Monetary Fund pact. New IPO Sarandis Chios Sweets SA, a producer of traditional Greek syrup sweets, will go public on February 4 to 6 to list on the Athens bourse’s small-cap market, underwriters said yesterday. Sarandis will offer the public 1.259 million new common registered shares and will privately place another 62,200. Issue adviser for the initial public offering is EFG Telesis Finance, with Commercial Bank’s Investment Bank the lead underwriter. The IPO’s price range has been set at 0.96 to 1.05 euros per share, with total proceeds expected between 1.26 to 1.38 million euros. The company is going public at 13.7 times its 2003 expected net earnings. Its main shareholder with a pre IPO stake of 40.5 percent is Nireus Aquaculture. (Reuters) Nothing to declare? More than half of those who acquired pleasure boats either did not declare them in their income tax forms or «forgot» to declare the price they bought them for, data supplied yesterday by the Economy and Finance Ministry show. A total of 11,711 taxpayers acquired pleasure craft in 2001; of these, 2,154 failed to declare the acquisition altogether; 4,058 either did not mention the price or made faulty statements.
