On April 4, Vienna Stock Exchange will showcase ways to bolster cooperation with its Bulgarian peer, the Bulgarian Stock Exchange (BSE) said in a filing Wednesday.
The April 4 presentation will take place in the presence of representatives from the Bulgarian bourse, the Financial Supervision Commission, investment vehicles and the finance ministry.
The meeting will come just days ahead of the deadline for a blueprint to sell the states blocking interest in BSE. Bulgarias Finance Minister Plamen Oresharski said in early March that while the privatisation strategy for the 44-per-cent stake would be ready by mid-April, the procedure to find a buyer for the state-owned equity will continue through year-end.
Local analysts characterised the timing of the Vienna Stock Exchange presentation as strategic as the bourse is in the frame of BSEs potential buyers.
The Austrian stock exchange operator will be looking to deny the competition of Deutsche Boerse, the Athens and Warsaw Stock Exchanges, the Nordic exchange operator OMX and Borsa Italiana.
The Vienna and Bulgarian stock exchange operators signed a memorandum on cooperation in March last year and since the Vienna bourse has been tracking the price of Bulgarias pharmaceuticals company, Sopharma. The company is present in two regional indices: the CECE Extended Index and the South-East Europa Traded Index.
The bourse mulled including other Bulgarian companies to its New Europe Blue Chip index, yet gave up on the plan because none of the potential entries met eligibility requirements.