ECONOMY

In Brief

Bank of Cyprus thinks Piraeus Bank’s move lacks strategy Bank of Cyprus (BoC) said yesterday Piraeus Bank’s recent move to build a 6 percent holding in the Cypriot bank lacked a strategic aim. «The BoC board thinks Piraeus Bank’s moves do not promote… the interests of all of Bank of Cyprus’s shareholders as they are piecemeal and lack a proven strategic objective,» Bank of Cyprus said in a statement. Piraeus announced last week that it had gradually accumulated a 6 percent holding in Bank of Cyprus, which is competing with France’s Credit Agricole to take over Emporiki Bank, Greece’s fourth-largest lender by assets. Piraeus Bank said last week its holding was part of its strategy to grow further in Greece and Southeastern Europe and that it had no bearing on Bank of Cyprus’s bid to acquire Emporiki Bank. Separately, Piraeus Bank dismissed a newspaper report that it had secured the backing of US private equity fund Carlyle Group on its recently acquired strategic holding in Bank of Cyprus. (Reuters) Mitsubishi plans to construct wind-power park in Bulgaria SOFIA (Reuters) – Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) is planning to invest 92.2 million levs ($59.33 million) to build a wind-power park on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, company officials said yesterday. MHI and Bulgarian engineering firm Inos 1 have set up a joint venture, Kaliakra Wind Power, to build the park by 2008. «We hope to launch the construction at the end of September or the beginning of October,» said Krasimir Kostadinov, representative of the Japanese company. Situated near the northeast Black Sea town of Kaliakra, the park will have 33 generators with 1-megawatt capacity each. The company expects the generators to produce around 70,000 megawatt hours of electricity per year. Seventy percent of the funding for the project will be supplied through loans from the Japanese Bank for International Cooperation. Shipbuilding Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Co, the world’s second-largest shipbuilder, said on Sunday its Romanian unit has won a combined $280 million order to build four container ships for German companies. Daewoo said in a statement that Daewoo Mangalia Heavy Industries had won an order to build two containers for Germany’s Gebab Holding GmbH & Co KG and another order to make two ships for Conti Holding GmbH & Co KG. Daewoo, which a company spokesman said has a 51 percent stake in the Romanian unit, said those ships would be delivered by October 2009. (Reuters) Milk deal The Competition Commission gave permission for the acquisition of Nestle Hellas’s dairy products sector by Delta Holdings and its subsidiary Eurofeed Hellas, as «this concentration is not expected to limit competition significantly in the sections of the market it concerns.» The deal concerns the production plant and the trademark of «Vlachas» milk and forms part of the two companies’ deal for Nestle to acquire Delta Ice Cream, recently approved by the commission.

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