PKO Privatisation Sparks Renewed Interest
Poland's love affair with privatisation rolled on along this week, with shares in the country's biggest bank, PKO BP, set to go on sale to individual investors at brokerages on Friday morning.
With brokerages offering to lend their customers up to 20 times the stake they put up, the offer of a 30-percent stake in the bank looks likely to be heavily oversubscribed, and most investors are likely to walk away with only small amounts of shares.
Two weeks ago 65,000 Poles spent up to 72 hours in line at PKO branches to put money into special '"privatisation deposits".
The deposits were sold on a first-come, first-served basis - unlike the shares on offer now, in which brokers will take orders for as many shares as people can afford, and orders will then be reduced in proportion to demand
Many Poles seem to be banking on a repeat of the 1994 privatisation of Bank Slaski, in which 800,000 people saw the value of their shares rise by 13 times on the first day of trading.
No professional analysts expect that to happen with PKO, speaking instead of a rise of around 10 percent when the shares hit the market on Nov. 10.
But since individual investors get a discount of up to 4 percent over the price offered to big institutions, that could still make PKO shares a very decent investment.
On Thursday evening the Treasury Minister, currently PKO's sole owner, said it would sell the shares for PLN 17.50-20.50 each (with the final price determined by demand), valuing the entire bank at PLN 17.5-20.5 billion.
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