The deal is put at some 100 million euros and is to be completed soon. Patriciu is thus taking one more step on the financial services market after having bought a stock broker this spring, whereas BCR, which 100% owns Anglo-Romanian Bank, gets a welcome injection of cash at a time when financing resources are dwindling fast on the banking markets.
BCR is also expecting to get 244 million euros from the sale of its insurance division, now that all approvals required to finalise the deal have been secured.
Sources on the financial market say that Patriciu had started talks with the Austrians at the end of August, after some of the investors that had already expressed interest had withdrawn from the race.
The bank is interesting to Patriciu partly because of its substantial exposure to countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States, including Kazakhstan and Georgia, two countries of interest for the entrepreneur's business.
Kazakhstan is where Kaz Munai Gaz, which bought 75% in Rompetrol from Patriciu last year is registered. With the money he got from this deal he set up an over 1 billion-euro fund in Holland, which should finance the takeover of Anglo-Romanian bank. As the bank is registered in the UK, the sale was contingent upon the approval of the supervisory authority in London that the buyer was required to secure.
The British banking licence and the thirty-five year old brand are precisely two of the most valuable assets of this institution.
Besides its business connections in the CIS and Central and Eastern Europe, banking sources say that Anglo-Romanian Bank can be easily turned into an investment banking and asset management boutique, which would serve clients with lots of cash available, and this is where the direct access to the financial markets in London comes into play.
Patriciu started showing an interest in the financial services market this spring, when he bought brokerage firm UniCredit Securities from UniCredit, which he renamed Tailwind, announcing his intentions of international development for this company.
This autumn, he changed its name again, to Fairwind Securities because the trademark had already been registered. The company accounts for about 1% of the market ten months into the year, ranking 35th of 77 among brokers.
The Austrians hired Rothschild & Sons investment bank to handle the sale of Anglo-Romanian Bank as the project leader.
The bank is sold in a packaged deal with all its branches, as Erste Bank feels the operations in London, Frankfurt and Bucharest are more valuable together than separately.
Erste also worked with Rothschild on the privatisation of BCR and on the sale of its stake in Asiban.
The takeover of the bank by Dinu Patriciu is supposed to be the only deal this year that makes an impact on the domestic banking market, after rumours of certain negotiations for the sale of Banca Carpatica and Libra Bank spread this year.
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