In the past year, hundreds of Czech and Slovak natural persons have invested tens of millions of dollars in the stock of Romania's Financial Investment Companies (SIFs). They now hold more than 10% in the richest two of the five SIFs: Transilvania and Banat-Crisana. Originally deemed as a mere migration of capital towards the Romanian market, which seems poised for greater growth than the Central-European countries, the Czech and Slovak "invasion" may in fact turn out to be an attempt to gradually take over the two financial investment companies.
In the past few weeks, after the General Meetings of SIF Shareholders, the market and the two quoted SIFs have increasingly received signals that a small group of investors is behind the Czech and Slovak purchases. This group may be coordinated by the US-based Brookdale Funds and by businessman Howard Golden.
Brookdale Funds and Howard Golden are well-known names in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and even Russia.
In the mid '90s, Brookdale funds, controlled by Golden, bought big chunks of the investment funds that resulted from the massive privatisation processes that took place in Central and Eastern Europe (those funds are the equivalent of Romania's SIFs). Following these purchases, Brookdale and Golden acquired control of many 'SIFs' from the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, taking over their management and restructuring their portfolios. And, according to market information, the same thing may also happen in Romania, although no single investor can count for more than 0.1% in a SIF's capital. In fact, this is why acquisitions were made by hundreds of natural persons from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, who are connected to the funds held by Brookdale and Howard Golden, market sources say.
"Before the General Meeting of Shareholders (which took place in April), the Czech and Slovak investors looked like portfolio investors - namely passive. However, the representatives of these investors gradually began to request increasingly more information about the way the company was run and also started asking for activity reports. One of these representatives is Howard Golden," sources from the management of SIF Banat-Crisana explained, under condition of anonymity.
Also, Brookdale International Partners and the Central European Privatization Fund, two entities from the Brookdale family of investment funds, each directly own a 0.1% stake in SIF Banat-Crisana.
The Brookdale funds were previously managed by a single American company - Brookdale Funds, owned by Howard Golden and Andrew Weiss (a reputed American economist). However, the two business partners recently split up, so that Weiss' management company is now called Weiss Asset management.
"Me and my companies no longer have anything to do with Howard Golden. I have no idea if he is operating alone or whether he has partners," Andrew Weiss told Ziarul Financiar.
However, the businessman would not comment on his funds' investments in SIF shares.
laurentiu.ispir@zf.ro
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