In Brief
Coke bottler to delist shares in Australia Greek Coke bottler Coca-Cola Hellenic (CCH) said yesterday it planned to delist its shares from the Australian stock exchange due to low trading volumes. «After the firm’s delisting… its common shares will continue to trade on the Athens and London stock exchanges and its depository shares will continue to trade on the New York Stock Exchange,» CCH said in a bourse filing. CCH said it had decided to delist the shares due to their low trade volume on the Australian bourse compared to other exchanges and in a bid to cut administrative costs. «These factors make it unlikely that CCH would seek to raise further equity capital via its listing on the Australian Stock Exchange,» it said. The world’s second-largest bottler of Coca-Cola products said the delisting would take effect on August 27. (Reuters) Cyprus’s public deficit hits 0.8 pct of GDP NICOSIA (Reuters) – Cyprus’s public deficit hit 0.8 percent of gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2009 with a sharp increase in spending and a fall in revenues, official data showed yesterday. Public expenditure rose 10.2 percent in the first three months of 2009 and revenues fell 4.1 percent, the statistics department said. In money terms, state coffers were running a 137.7-million-euro cash deficit in the first three months of 2009 compared to a 90-million-euro surplus, representing 0.5 percent of GDP, in the first quarter of 2008. The Cypriot Finance Ministry last week said it expected the island’s public deficit to reach between 2.0 and 2.5 percent of GDP for the full year, on slowing revenues and falling demand. The island, which represents about 0.2 percent of the eurozone economy, recorded a 0.9 percent surplus in 2008. Sale complete Piraeus Bank SA, Greece’s fourth-biggest lender, sold a 3.95 percent stake to investors for 102 million euros ($144 million) in a sale managed by UBS AG, according to an Athens bourse filing yesterday. Piraeus sold about 13.3 million treasury shares at 7.70 euros each, the filing said. (Bloomberg) Energy rivalries European energy companies must set aside rivalries if they wish to prevent Russian firm Gazprom from buying up excess natural gas volumes from the western Caspian basin, a vice president of the Azeri state oil company said. Three European pipeline projects vying for Caspian Sea gas should first agree on transit via Turkey to give Azerbaijan an alternative offer to the Russian gas exporter’s, Elshad Nassirov said yesterday in an interview in the Azeri capital Baku. Gazprom, which supplies about 25 percent of Europe’s gas, is seeking all the fuel produced in the second phase of Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz development in an effort to remove the supply base for one of the projects, OMV AG’s Nabucco link. (Bloomberg) Impact jumps Impact SA, Romania’s largest publicly traded home builder, rose the most in almost two weeks in Bucharest trading after saying the real estate market had rebounded in May. (Bloomberg)
