Romania’s Fondul Proprietatea launches EUR 186 mln buyback offer

Fondul Proprietatea (BVB ticker: FP), the largest investment fund in Romania, will launch a public offer to buy back 750 million of its own shares for a fixed price of RON 1.11 per share (some EUR 0.25 per share), the fund’s manager, Franklin Templeton Investment, announced on Wednesday, October 29. The total value of the offer is some EUR 186 million. The buyback price is 18% higher than the Tuesday’s closing price for FP shares, which was RON 0.935 (EUR 0.21). Fondul Proprietatea’s shares gained 1.6%, on Wednesday morning, after the offer price was announced, going up to RON 0.95 per share. The 750 million shares which the fund plans to buyback with this offer represent 6% of the fund’s total number of shares. If the offer is oversubscribed, which means that investors want to sell more shares than the fund wants to buy, then there will be a pro-rata allocation, which means that the fund will buy the same fraction of what every investor wants to sell. The intermediary of the offer is Raiffeisen Bank. The offer starts on November 3 and ends on December 2. This offer is part of a larger buyback program which the fund initiated at the end of September. Andrei Chirileasa, andrei@romania-insider.com