News Parkiet

Equity market

SEC de-registers six bankrupt firms

Polish SEC has decided to take back its clearance for six companies that were delisted on the Warsaw Stock Exchange over the years after they went bankrupt. They include Polisa insurance group, cigarette wholesaler Pażur SA, Łukbut shoe factory, GK Inwest property developer, PIA Piasecki building company and STGroup, an IT distributor. None of the six met Polish disclosure standards for publicly traded securities, the SEC said.

?There are about ten similar firms?, SEC spokesman Łukasz Dajnowicz said, signaling that the purge of the Polish equity market isn?t over yet. ?It?s good news for most of them. Their bankruptcy administrators would like to go private again, but they have no money to file an application to do so?, he added.

Information Technology

Softbank snatches another deal

with PKO BP

Shares of Polish banking IT provider Softbank SA rose 2.4 percent to close at 29.5 zloty yesterday after Warsaw-based firm said it has signed a 67.4 million zloty contract with PKO BP, the country?s biggest bank. The deal comes on top of other orders from state-owned giant totaling about 500 million zloty over the last eighteen months. Softbank originally build PKO BP?s backoffice system called Zorba. In September 2003 the company along with Accenture and Alnova Technologies won a 114-million dollar contract to build a replacement for Zorba.

Banking

Getin Bank to open new branches

Getin Bank, a mid-sized lender controlled by Polish businessman Leszek Czarnecki, says it plans to become one the country?s top ten banks in terms of number of branches as it expands its retail network. Formerly known as Górnośląski Bank Regionalny, a regional bank from Silesia, Getin says it will add about 55 branches to the 75 existing branches inherited from GBG and from Bank Przemysłowy, a distressed regional bank it bought last year.

Getin, which started out as a B2B Internet company several years ago, said it had 255 000 customers, including about 20 000 corporate accounts at the end of 2004.