BANJA LUKA (Bosnia and Herzegovina), December 7 (SeeNews) – Bosnia’s Serb Republic said on Friday it has received a sole bid for 57.4% of pneumatic tools and compressors producer Trudbenik Doboj from a Croatian-Bosnian consortium.
“One offer has been submitted by the deadline [on December 7]. The bidder is a consortium of three companies: AIKON and TEP from Zagreb and KOMPAIR from Doboj,” the Serb Republic’s Investment and Development Bank (IRBRS), which manages the sale, said in a statement. It did not disclose the price offered by the consortium.
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It added the formal validity of the offer now has to be verified but gave no timeframe for the evaluation procedure.
IRBRS called a tender for the 57.4% government stake in Trudbenik in October. Tender conditions required from potential buyers to have had revenue of at least 5.0 million marka ($3.7 million/2.6 million euro) in each of 2006 and 2005. If the bidder was a consortium, at least one firm in it had to fulfil that condition.
No domestic bidders with state ownership exceeding 25% had been allowed to participate.
The future owner also has to keep Trudbenik’s core activity and retain its current staff three years after the purchase.
Trudbenik’s other bigger shareholders are the Serb Republic’s pension and restitution funds, which own 8.2% and 4.1%, respectively. The remaining shares are with private investment funds and individual shareholders.
Trudbenik is based in Doboj, in the northern part of the Serb Republic, which together with the Muslim-Croat Federation forms war-divided Bosnia.
(1 euro = 1.95583 Bosnian marka)