March 16 (SeeNews) - Romania on Thursday sold out a planned 600 million lei ($140 million/132 million euro) new issue of six-month Treasury bills, central bank data showed.
The average accepted yield at the auction was 0.71%, the data indicated.
Demand for the government securities, which will mature on 18 September 2017, totalled 1.42 billion lei.
Ahead of Thursday's auction, Raiffeisen Bank analysts commented that following two cancelled auctions, the issuance has much better chances of success given the short term tenor, benefiting from the liquidity surplus in the money market.
"The excess liquidity of banks remained elevated in February, the latest data available, and no upward pressures on money market rates was recorded until now in March," Raiffeisen Bank analysts said in a daily market report.
Romania on Monday rejected all bids in a 300 million lei auction of 2024 Treasury notes. On March 9, it also rejected all bids in a 600 million lei auction of Treasury notes due in 2020.
Details about the issue follow:
Auction date |
March 16 |
Amount offered (mln lei) |
600.0 |
Amount sold (mln lei) |
600.0 |
Total bids placed (mln lei) |
1,427.4 |
Bid-to-cover ratio |
2.38 |
Yield (%) |
0.71 |
Romania's finance ministry plans to auction 3.7 billion lei worth of in government securities in March, according to the debt issuance calendar for the month. The ministry also plans to sell an additional 375 million lei of government paper in non-competitive offers.
In February, the finance ministry sold 3.32 billion lei in domestic debt paper and an additional 315 million lei in non-competitive offers, below its initial target of 3.9 billion lei.
So far this year, the finance ministry has sold some 8.1 billion lei worth of leu bills and bonds.
At the beginning of March, the ministry said it plans to sell about 2.5-3.0 billion euro ($2.6-3.1 billion) worth of eurobonds on the international markets and some 48-50 billion lei worth of leu-denominated domestic debt this year.
(1 euro=4.5509 lei)