"If we increase our stake now, we will make a public offer".Would you do this at home?HypoVereinsbank, a German bank, paid the Polish treasury more than twice as much per share for Bank Przemyslowo-Handlowy (BPH) than it paid minority shareholders.
It will also sell the BPH brand to the highest bidder and pledge not to lay off any employees for two years at BPH or the other Polish bank, Pekao.
But in Poland it involves the merger of the second-biggest bank, Pekao (owned by UniCredit), with the third-biggest, BPH (controlled by HVB .The EU's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, cleared the deal in October.
So far, so good To give or forgive Reprints Related items European banks: Love across the AlpsJun 2nd 2005UniCredit will pay around €19 billion ($23 billion) for a full takeover of HVB and its listed affiliates, Bank Austria and BPH, a Polish bank.
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Three Austrian banks Erste Bank, the German-owned BA-CA, and Raiffeisenbank each bought or built leading banks in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, and BA-CA also assembled what is now the third-biggest bank in Poland, BPH.
Similarly, Templeton, an American investment firm, complained last summer that Germany's HypoVereinsbank had acquired shares in BPH, a Polish bank in which it was the main shareholder, at a suspiciously low price.
It had already looked at BPH, a medium-sized corporate bank in 1994, but balked at the price, and BPH was floated on the stock exchange the next year.
This week's share sale will give Bank Austria something to spend in central Europe, even though euro400m of it was earmarked for the purchase of the 18% of BPH that is still owned by HVB.In any event, with 75%, the Bavarians still have control of Bank Austria, although remerger (or demerger) would require a 90% vote.
But it has a strong retail presence only in Poland, through BPH, and Bulgaria, through Bank Biochim.
