Shareholders of Macedonia's Stopanska Banka Bitola Plan To Sell Majority Stake to Strategic Investor

"The shareholders plan to form a majority stake, that means more than 51% of the shares, and the bank plans to sell it to a strategic investor, a foreign bank," the bank said in a statement filed to the Macedonian Stock Exchange (MSE), where it is listed. It did not elaborate.

"We are planning to start a procedure for selling the stake in the middle of February," a company official, who declined to be named, told SeeNews without elaborating.

Local agricultural company ZK Pelagonija Bitola owns 21.29% of Stopanska Banka Bitola and the rest of the shares is owned by private shareholders.

Stopanska Banka Bitola, based in the southwestern town of Bitola, is one of the small locally-owned banks in the southeast European country of two million people, unlike Greek-owned Stopanska Banka Skopje, which is the third-largest bank in Macedonia.

Stopanska Banka Bitola had a preliminary net profit of 206.5 million denars ($4.95 million/ 3.3 million euro) for the first nine months of 2007, up 19.9% from the same period of 2006, according to the latest data available.

Stopanska Banka is included in the blue-chip index of the Macedonian bourse. The bank's stock closed at 9,950 denars on Wednesday, down 0.17% from Tuesday, according to the latest data available.

(1 euro = 61.9936 Macedonian denars)