Vietcombank continues quest to divest OCB
Vietcombank continues quest to divest OCB
In an effort to reduce its cross-ownership at local banks, Vietcombank is on route to auction over 6.6 million shares of Orient Commercial Bank (OCB) on April 17, at the starting price of VND13,000 ($0.59) per share.
According to the Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX), 6,672,444 OCB shares will be made available to investors on the given date, following an earlier bid made last year when the state-owned bank also put 18.9 million OCB stakes (equivalent to 4.85 per cent of the lender’s charter capital) on sale.
Nevertheless, merely 70 per cent of the shares were sold at the time at an average bidding price of VND13,005 ($0.591) per share. After the sale, Vietcombank’s ownership at OCB was trimmed to 3.97 from 4.72 per cent.
The share sale brought Vietcombank some VND171.1 billion ($7.77 million) in value then.
On the over-the-counter (OTC) trading platform, OCB was traded at VND18,900-20,900 ($0.859-0.95) during the past week.
Offloading its holdings at OCB is one of Vietcombank’s ways to comply with the central bank’s Circular 36, which allows commercial banks to hold stakes at no more than two credit institutions or to acquire and hold only 5 per cent of the stakes with voting rights in any other credit institution.
Apart from OCB, Vietcombank currently holds 8.19 per cent of the stakes at Eximbank and 6.97 per cent at Military Bank.
