Business Review

Finance Ministry has borrowed today about RON 959 million from commercial banks, through a discount treasury certificates emission. 

BRD – Groupe Societe Generale announced today that the banks net profit has dropped by 36 percent to RON 501 million last year, while the net income reached RON 3.68 billion, representing a 2 percent increased compared with 2009’s results. 

Porsche Finance Group Romania has launched a new solution for auto financing. 

The deplorable state of the local public healthcare system should spell heaven for insurance companies. Romanians however, have not been so eager to take out private health insurance in recent years and the market is estimated to have fallen by 23.5 percent between September 2009 and September 2010. Tiberiu Maier, vice president of the local subsidiary of German Signal Iduna, told BR he is confident that 2011 will bring a recovery.

Simona Bazavan

Romgaz’s “donation” of RON 400 million to prop up a weak state budget to the detriment of the company’s shareholders (including the Property Fund), the opportunity – or lack of it – on the issue of the two national energy champions and the international road show to promote the fund to international investors all rank high on the to-do list of Greg Konieczny, executive VP of Franklin Templeton Investment Management Limited Bucharest and portfolio manager of the Property Fund for this year. He told Business Review that the first major hurdle is the fund’s listing on the Bucharest Stock Exchange on January 25, while an ongoing challenge is to increase the value of the companies in the fund’s portfolio, which has a significant exposure to the energy sector where the state holds a majority.

Dana Verdes

Insolvency has shot up in 2010, both in terms of the number of companies and the value. Big names such as Boom, Leonardo, Tiago Malls, TCE Logistic, Diverta and Flanco have had to seek solutions to pacify the creditors knocking at their doors. However, it seems that the eye of the storm has passed: next year insolvency practitioners foresee a decrease in the rate of new insolvency proceedings.

Dana Verdes

The Netherlands is Romania’s top source of foreign investment with Dutch companies being among the first wave to target the local economy soon after EU accession. There were good reasons for their interest then, and in spite of the slow economic progress and limp post-crisis recovery there are good reasons to invest in Romania now, Jochum Haakma, TMF director of group business development and former consul general of Shanghai, told Business Review.

Simona Bazavan

Prevention is better than cure, agreed the specialists present at the latest Business Review event, Risk Management, held on November 17. Insight into ways to select cost-effective risk-management solutions and find the appropriate methods to plan and implement them was provided throughout the event by experts from various backgrounds, from legal, tax, and business development to human resources and insurance.

Corina Dumitrescu

If everything goes according to plan, Romania should receive its seventh disbursement from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), worth almost EUR 900 million, in January, a month later than previously agreed. However this depends entirely on the government’s commitment to make headway on reforms and meet the conditions negotiated during the sixth review of the EUR 13 billion bailout agreement that ended last week, on November 1.

Simona Bazavan

When it comes to the local fiscal environment and its attractiveness, it all boils down to two fundamentals which perhaps all legal and tax experts agree that Romania lacks: fiscal stability and predictability. With this Tax Insert BR takes a look at some of the latest legislative developments as they have been reflected in recent public discussions such as the Tax&Law event organized by this magazine on October 14.