In Brief
Court gives nod to Wind Hellas debt-restructuring plan LONDON (Reuters) – A British court has given the green light to a restructuring deal from Wind Hellas’s parent Weather Investments that will wipe out the investments of the Greek telecoms giant’s junior creditors. Senior creditors earlier this month accepted a plan from Weather, controlled by Egyptian tycoon Naguib Sawiris, to restructure Wind Hellas’s 3.2-billion-euro ($4.8 billion) debt burden, rejecting a bid for the business from the subordinated bondholders, owed some 1.2 billion euros. The court agreed the appointments of Maggie Mills and Alan Hudson from Ernst & Young as administrators of the business, E&Y said in a statement yesterday. The court sanctioned the restructuring deal, slated for today, which will see Weather’s plan implemented. But subordinated bondholders maintain their offer was better than Weather’s and vow to continue their fight to recover their money. «Our latest proposal offered vastly superior economic returns to all stakeholders as well as laying the foundations for an early refinancing in 2010,» said a spokesman for the committee of subordinated bondholders. Bulgaria to sell controlling stake in local bourse SOFIA (Reuters) – Bulgaria will seek an investor for its controlling 44 percent stake in the Sofia Stock Exchange as part of efforts to turn the operator into a regional market player, Finance Minister Simeon Djankov said yesterday. The ministry’s press office quoted Djankov as saying that Deutsche Boerse and Wiener Boerse were among potential interested investors. The Sofia exchange uses the German exchange’s Xetra electronic trading platform, while Vienna operator Wiener Boerse already owns large slices of the Budapest, Prague and Ljubljana bourses. Wiener Boerse said it was in principle interested in the stake but no concrete talks were under way, while Deutsche Boerse declined to comment. «Our plans are to find an investor in a relatively short [period], up to several months, who will make our bourse a regional player,» said Djankov, who is also a deputy premier in the Balkan country’s government that won July elections. Attempts by previous governments to sell the stake have failed, though they attracted interest from exchanges in Western and Eastern Europe. «[The investor] should be relatively big. Such are the German and the Austrian bourses which have already declared their interest,» Djankov said. Wiener Boerse bought stakes in the Ljubljana, Prague and Budapest bourses last year as it vies for influence in emerging Europe with the Warsaw stock exchange. Rights issue covered Alpha Bank SA, Greece’s third-biggest lender, raised 986 million euros in a sale of new shares to existing shareholders, Chief Financial Officer Marinos Giannopoulos said in a phone interview yesterday. The sale was more than fully covered, attracting demand of more than 100 percent, he said. (Bloomberg) Hellenic Bank Hellenic Bank Pcl, the third-biggest Cypriot lender, posted a drop in nine-month profit on higher charges for nonperforming loans. Profit fell to 15 million euros from 56.7 million euros a year earlier. (Bloomberg)
