BELGRADE (Serbia), November 5 (SeeNews) – Serbia plans to adopt legislation for the sale of its oil monopoly Naftna Industrija Srbije (NIS) in the first half of 2008, Economy Minister Mladjan Dinkic said on Monday.
“We will propose an international tender to be opened, in which a 51% stake is be offered to a strategic partner,” Dinkic told a news conference. The government in Belgrade said earlier it would open a tender for NIS by the end of 2007.
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Of the remaining shares, some 15% will be distributed to Serbian citizens, while the government will keep a 34% stake, said Dinkic. He did not elaborate.
NIS, state-owned Telekom Srbija and power utility Elektroprivreda Srbije (EPS) are not traded on the bourse yet but analysts estimate that if the three monopolies are offered on the stock exchange, their combined market capitalisation could exceed the overall market capitalisation of all the 1,500 companies currently listed there. At the end of October, the total market capitalization of the Belgrade Stock Exchange was 19.4 billion euro.
“Some 15% of the shares in each of these companies will be put on the bourse,” Deputy Prime Minister Bozidar Djelic told the same news conference.
“Shares in the Telekom will be floated on the bourse next year,” Djelic told SeeNews. “It is planned for the shares in NIS to be floated two years after the company gets a strategic partner, while an EPS bourse listing can be expected no earlier than four years.”