Artio main buyer in the 100m-euro BRD transaction

American funds Artio Global, the biggest foreign investors on the Stock Exchange, with a portfolio of over 100 million euros at the end of October 2010, bought a large share of the 5% stake in BRD sold by the EBRD for 107 million euros, in the biggest transaction in the history of the Stock Exchange.

The transaction was coordinated by Rudolph-Riad Younes, who runs the international investment department of Artio Global Management. Younes (49) is one of the first international fund managers to bet on the Romanian market, making his entry as early as 2002 by acquiring significant stakes in Petrom and BRD worth tens of millions of dollars and had come in 2007 to control half a billion dollars on the Stock Exchange through the funds he managed. Younes manages three Artio funds at present, with 18 billion dollars (over 13 billion euros) in overall assets.

Alongside Artio, buyers include other foreign investment funds that already have exposure to the Romanian market, according to market sources. The over 100 million-euro transactions involving BRD are the biggest in the history of the Bucharest Stock Exchange and show a sudden revival in the interest of foreign investors in the Romanian market, although the economy still has a few steps to take to fully come out of recession.