OTP Bank: „We didn’t expect Romania to call a fair price for CEC!”

Near the end of the privatization of the last and largest popular bank in Romania, CEC, there are two major players still in race: OTP Bank and the National Bank of Greece. It seems though that OTP has had enough.

“OTP didn’t expect Romania to demand a fair price for CEC”, said Laszlo Wolf, deputy CEO of OTP Bank on Thursday, during a banking conference in Frankfurt. Without unveiling any figures, Wolf mentioned that there is a big difference between what OTP can offer and what the Romanian state demands.

“OTP is looking for a reasonable price acquisition and I don’t thing we’d be able to find that” Laszlo Wolf added.

Both candidates look for a place on the Romanian market, given the extremely fast development rate in this area.

Hungarian companies such as OTP and MOL try to expand their businesses on the neighboring markets, where the profit rates are considerably higher than the domestic ones.

During the past few years, OTP spent over 2.2 billion euros in taking over Bulgarian and Russian banks.