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Southeast Europe
October 5, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 15
“Citizens decided that the country’s future is in the EU and Nato. The decision was not easy but must have been taken,” Zaev said at the news conference surrounded by members of his SDSM party.
The leader of the main opposition party, conservative VMRO-DPMNE, Hristijan Mickoski, said following the vote that the referendum was not successful as the threshold of 50%+ one vote was not reached.
His party is against the name deal, claiming it is capitulatory one and against the country’s nation- al interests.
Mickoski, who did not cast his vote in the referen-
dum, did not openly call for a boycott ahead of the vote under pressure from Western diplomats, but many opposition MPs announced before the vote that they would boycott it.
The VMRO-DPMNE leader also said previously that his party will not support constitutional changes if the threshold is not reached.
President Gjorge Ivanov, who is close to VMRO- DPMNE, said in an address to the UN General Assembly in New York last week that he would not cast a vote in the plebiscite, saying that the country was being asked to commit "historical suicide".
EBRD takes 41% in Moldova’s biggest bank MAIB as banking sector turnaround begins
Ben Aris in Berlin
Moldova has been a banking black hole for more than two decades. Tiny, poor and unreformed,
the country has been used by businessmen from across the former Soviet Union as a willing bank- ing base to launder money as the most convenient entrepôt into the European financial system. But that could be about to change, as Moldova follows the likes of Russia and Ukraine in cleaning up its banking sector.
On October 2 the European Bank for Reconstruc- tion and Development (EBRD), together with two private equity investment funds — Horizon Capi- tal from Ukraine that used to be run by former finance minister Natalie Jaresko, and the Latvia- based AB Invalda INVL fund — agreed to buy a 41% stake in the country’s largest bank Moldova- Agroindbank (MAIB) after that stake was confis- cated from “non-transparent shareholders” by the central bank. The three paid MDL451.533mn (€23mn) for the stake.
“Moldova’s banking sector has been plagued by non-transparent shareholders for too long. You would remember the $20bn money-laundering scandal, the so-called Moldovan Laundromat, and the $1bn theft from three key banks (12% of Moldova’s GDP),” says Francis Malige, the EBRD's managing director for Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. “But Moldova now proves that a turna- round is possible.”
The Vilnius-based Invalda INVL group’s compa- nies have more than €600mn of assets under management, entrusted to them by over 190,000 clients in Lithuania and Latvia as well as interna- tional investors. Horizon Capital is a private equity firm managing funds which provide financing to businesses in Ukraine and Moldova. Its funds have attracted investments from the EBRD and other investors. Malige told bne IntelliNews that none of the partners dominate the ownership in the consortium.