November 11 (SeeNews) - The share prices of Romania’s five geographically-defined funds, the SIFs, soared on Wednesday afternoon after the country’s Senate voted to raise the ownership limit for a single shareholder in the funds to 5.0% from 1.0%.
The BET-FI index, which tracks the funds, was up 4.23% at 1037 GMT at 21,448.57 points.
"We remind that the final word on this matter belongs to the Chamber of Deputies. The market had only a modest reaction to the news as this outcome was already priced in," Raiffeisen Capital Investment said in a note to investors.
The share prices of the SIFs are very sensitive to any news related to the raising or scrapping of the shareholding cap designed to safeguard the funds from any single investor gaining control. The funds are listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange, BVB.
The SIFs were set up in Romania along regional lines during the voucher privatisation programme in the 1990s as a vehicle in which local residents could invest their vouchers. The funds were initially endowed with 30% of all state-owned assets and they continue to hold significant stakes in a number of major companies across all sectors of the Romanian economy.