Insurance-reinsurance company Astra, in which the Romanian state holds 75% of shares, is involved in three lawsuits filed after the failure of the privatisation process launched last autumn, triggering a lot of misunderstandings.
"Last week, we were announced that we had won the lawsuit filed against the former State Ownership Fund (SOF) last December," Sergio Mollo, manager of Ceptura SRL, told Ziarul Financiar.
Ceptura SRL got the most points when it bid for Astra last autumn, speculating the absence of a specification regarding temporal confines of the investment pledge. Ceptura pledged large investments (about 3,000 billion lei) to be applied within 30 years, which ranked it the first bidder.
After having realised the error, the former SOF decided to resume the privatisation and dropped Ceptura from the competition, considering that its offer was "light".
On December 20, Bucharest Court, which had tried the lawsuit filed by Ceptura, decided through a definitive but not irrevocable sentence that "SOF shall conclude the privatisation contract with Ceptura SRL or, otherwise, it will pay damages worth 3 million lei daily till the contract concludes", as Mollo said.
The Privatisation and State Participation Authority submitted an appeal against the Bucharest Court decision and it has to motivate it.
Administrator Int., the company having ranked second in the bidding war, withdrew when the Privatisation Commission granted the highest grade to Ceptura. The third ranked bidder, Nova Trade, also filed a lawsuit against the former SOF and won the claim.
"We contested SOF decision to cancel the initial auction. If SOF considered that the first bidder's offer was not sound and the second bidder withdrew, the third ranked bidder, namely Nova Trade, ought to be designated the new Astra owner," Dan Domnitanu, deputy general manager of Nova Trade, told Ziarul Financiar.
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