In Brief
Four groups bid to build private power plant Four groups, including one led by Italy’s leading utility Enel, submitted bids for a Greek state contract to build a power plant, transmission system operator DESMHE said yesterday. Enelco, a joint venture by Enel, Greece’s Copelouzos Group and Corinthos Power, a group including Spain’s Iberdrola and Greek Motor Oil, bid for the contract to build a 400-megawatt power plant, DESMHE said. The tender, which will be granted to the bidder that requests the lowest guaranteed annual income for a 12-year period, is set to range between 14 and 37 million euros. Energiaki Thisvis, a joint venture between Edison and Greece’s Hellenic Technodomiki and Viohalco, as well as a consortium led by Greece’s Terna also bid for the project, DESMHE said. Attica Holdings 2006 profit declines by 6.4 percent Greece’s largest ferry operator, Attica Holdings, posted 2006 net profit down 6.4 percent as one-off gains from the sale of some vessels failed to offset high oil prices. Net income dropped to 26.3 million euros from 28.08 million euros in 2005, while earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) dropped 27.8 percent to 71.5 million euros, the company said yesterday. Sales for the period fell 15 percent to 326.6 million euros as Attica pulled out of the Baltic Sea market. The company will propose to shareholders a dividend of 0.08 euros per share on 2006 earnings, it said in a statement. Finansbank Turkey’s Finansbank, acquired by National Bank of Greece last year, posted total revenues of 1.6 billion lira (920 million euros) in 2006, 28 percent higher than the previous year, the bank said yesterday. Finansbank’s personal loans expanded 76 percent to 4.3 billion lira, despite a sharp rise in interest rates in Turkey last year. Housing loans, a component of personal loans, rose 120 percent, the bank said. The bank opened 101 new branches in Turkey last year and plans to raise the number to 550 in 2009 from 309 now. (Reuters) Turkish GNP Turkey’s gross national product came in above $390 billion (300 billion euros) in 2006, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday, making for nominal growth of more than 7.9 percent. Gross national product in dollar terms was reported at $361.5 billion for 2005. But inflation ended last year at 9.65 percent. «The final figures are due in March but our estimate is that GNP surpassed $390 billion,» Erdogan told an investors’ conference in Istanbul. The data are due on March 31. (Reuters) Meinl in Istanbul Austrian real estate developer Meinl European Land won a tender for a 90,000-square-meter land plot in the Asian part of Istanbul with a 100-million-euro bid, it said yesterday. Meinl, which last month raised 1.5 billion euros in fresh cash to underpin its rapid growth in Eastern Europe, Russia and Turkey, said it would spend another 100 million euros to develop a 50,000 sq.m. shopping center on the plot. (Reuters)
