December 4 (SeeNews) - The European Fund for South East Europe (EFSE) has extended a $5.0 million (3.4 million euro) loan to Moldovan bank FinComBank to support lending to the country’s small business, the bank said on Tuesday.
The five-year loan will allow the bank to diversify its credit portfolio and will improve the small business's access to long-term lending, FinComBank said in a statement.
It added that micro and small enterprises are the bank's main clients with a 60.3% share in its credit portfolio.
The EFSE was set up in 2005 as a successor to a development finance initiative launched by several donors in southeast Europe in 1998. Its shareholders include sovereign donors, national and international financial institutions and the European Commission. The fund, which is active in Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia, h3ad a 334 million euro credit portfolio at the end of September.
FinComBank had a net profit of 32.2 million lei ($2.9 million/2.0 million euro) for the nine months through September, up 63.7% from a year earlier.
(1 euro=16.5552 Moldovan lei)