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ICO & Deals
June 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 13
Czech PPF to acquire 100% of Serbia’s Telenor banka
Czech investment group PPF has announced that it will acquire a 100% stake in Serbia-based Tel- enor Banka from Telenor Group, subject to obtain- ing the relevant regulatory approvals.
The Czech investor says that the transaction is
a natural follow up to its acquisition of Telenor Group’s telecommunications assets in Central and Eastern Europe, specifically in Hungary, Bul- garia, Serbia and Montenegro.
Telenor announced in March it had agreed to sell its subsidiaries in Bulgaria, Hungary, Montenegro and Serbia to PPF Group for €2.8bn. The transac- tion is expected to be completed within Q3 2018 and requires regulatory approval.
According to PPF, the acquisition of Telenor banka in Serbia is subject to approval by the Serbian central bank National Bank of Serbia (NBS) and relevant antitrust authorities.
Telenor banka was launched in 2014, the year after Telenor Group acquired Serbia's KBC Banka. It is the first bank in Serbia to offer ser- vices such as multi-currency accounts, receiving money from abroad without double provisions, transfers to mobile phones and quick payment of bills. PPF’s press release reads that Telenor Banka provides its services primarily to Telenor clients; currently, its portfolio includes more than 390,000 clients.
In terms of assets, the bank is in the second
half of the twenty largest banks operating on the Serbian market; at the end of 2017, the bank had assets under management worth €126mn.
In February, the NBS declined to approve Bulgar- ian investment fund River Stixx Capital’s acquisi- tion of 85% of Telenor banka.
Sberbank and National Settlement Depository to test new ICO technology
As Russia prepares to regulate ICOs and crypto- currencies, Russia’s central bank launched this past April a “regulatory platform” to experiment and implement new financial services and tech- nologies that require legislative changes.
This platform, which involves other state institu- tions and industry associations, will be used in the near future to test an ICO technology. The first
transactions involving tokenized assets are to be completed by the end of summer 2018. The tokens will be issued by Level One, a company that man- ages Moscow’s biggest commercial lecture hall.
This pilot project is being conducted by Sberbank CIB, Sberbank’s corporate and investment bank- ing business, and National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia’s central securities depository. The