In Brief
Emporiki to shed control of Cyprus subsidiary Emporiki Bank has signed a preliminary agreement to sell a majority stake in its Cypriot subsidiary to Cypriot investors, a bank official said on Friday. «This move is part of the group’s restructuring. We did the same in Armenia. Georgia will follow,» the official, who declined to be named, told Reuters. In a stock market filing, Emporiki Bank said the buyers of a majority stake in Emporiki Bank Cyprus were businessmen Hagop Keheyan and Pericles Mangglis. It did not provide financial details. Emporiki Bank Cyprus has 12 branches in Cyprus. (Reuters) Tanklog in deal with Euronav BRUSSELS – Belgian crude oil transport company Euronav said on Friday it had completed the sixth and final tranche of a deal worth more than $1 billion to acquire the fleet of Tanklog Ltd. Under the terms of the deal, first announced in March, Tanklog, managed by Greece’s Ceres Hellenic Shipping Enterprises Ltd, is to become Euronav’s second-largest shareholder, with a stake of just over 20 percent. In a statement, Euronav said it had received the Cap Leon in exchange for cash and a capital increase by means of a contribution in kind by which a total of 1,216,488 new shares were issued to a company related to Tanklog. The Cap Leon is time chartered out long term to Valero, it said. (Reuters) Serbia-IMF Serbia’s central bank on Friday urged the government to stick to reforms agreed with the International Monetary Fund rather than risk losing credibility with lenders, investors and the European Union. The bank criticized a decision to hire an advisor to draft a general privatization strategy for the NIS oil monopoly, rather than prepare the sale of two refineries as agreed with the Fund. «A tender for a privatization advisor is only a part of the loan deal with the IMF… Even though the tender is a good start, offering majority stakes in two refineries was the minimum which the Serbian government accepted and it should meet this part of the agreement, too,» the central bank said. Belgrade in May promised to sell the refineries by 2006 to win an extension of a 2002-2005 loan deal. (Reuters)
