Financial economics

Local banks need to make a fast return to private hands, Alpha Bank CEO Dimitrios Mantzounis stressed while addressing the lender’s general meeting on Friday. Vassilios Rapanos, the bank’s president, referred to a need for stability and the implementation of reforms.

Greece’s biggest refiner Hellenic Petroleum (ELPE) said on Thursday it mandated Barclays Bank PLC and Credit Suisse Securities as global coordinators to issue a five-year bond.

This would be the company’s second debt issue since May, when it sold $400 million of bonds to improve its liquidity.

[Reuters]

Greece's biggest refiner Hellenic Petroleum said on Thursday it mandated Barclays Bank PLC and Credit Suisse Securities as global coordinators to issue a five-year bond.

Hellenic did not give any further details about the timing or the size of the bonds. This would be the company's second debt issue since May, when it sold $400 million of bonds to improve its liquidity.

Proposed amendments to the Non-bank Financial Institutions Act provide a BGN 1 M capital requirement for the fast credit companies, reports Expert.bg. 

The amendments are tabled by the MPs Rumen Gechev (Bulgarian Socialist Party) and Yordan Tsonev (Movement for Rights and Freedoms). 

Croatia, Macedonia and Bulgaria link their stock exchanges

By Sotiris Nikas

The remarkable decline in the interest rate of Greek bonds, particularly that of the recently issued five-year paper that has even dropped below 4 percent, is feeding rumors among investors that Athens is contemplating a new bond.

BELGRADE - The average indebtedness of a Serbian citizen stands at EUR 750, which is around 16 times less than the average indebtedness per EU citizen and five times less than in Croatia, said Veroljib Dugalic, secretary general of the Association of Serbian Banks.

By Christina Kopsini

The Greek social security system is a ticking time bomb. Excluding the seamen’s and farmers’ pension funds (NAT and OGA respectively), the reserves of the rest don’t even top 4.5 billion euros, which is not enough to fund pensions after 2016, when the problem will explode.

Fitch Ratings has upgraded the state-guaranteed long-term senior debt rating of National Bank of Greece (NBG, B-/Stable), Alpha Bank (Alpha, B-/Stable) and Eurobank Ergasias (Eurobank, B-/Stable) to 'B' from 'B-'.

The rating actions follow the upgrade of Greece's sovereign Long-Term foreign currency Issuer Default Rating (IDR). [Reuters]

Friday’s June triple witching and a sudden interest expressed by foreign buyers in the week’s very last hour of trading took the Greek bourse’s benchmark above 1,300 points and its weekly gains close to 3 percent.