Addiko Bank: After the fierce Slovenian-Serbian race for shares, everything has returned to normal

Last Friday marked the end of the deadline for two offers to purchase shares of the Austrian Addiko Bank. As expected, both offers ended in failure, and the ownership structure of the bank, which has branches in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, BiH, and Montenegro, making it hyper-attractive for acquisition by bankers with high ambitions in this region, has not changed for now.

The company Agri Europe Cyprus, owned by one of Serbia’s leading entrepreneurs Miodrag Kostića, remains at its 9.99 percent stake in Addiko Bank, making it still the largest individual shareholder. However, Kostić, who reached that stake through several transactions over the past two years, failed in his aim to increase his piece of the pie in Addiko by another 17 percent. His offer of 16.24 euros per share (plus dividend for the previous year), which was initially quite reasonable and reflected the price of Addiko’s shares on the Vienna Stock Exchange, turned out to be too low after Nova Ljubljanska Banka (NLB) jumped in with its offer of 20 euros (reduced for future dividend payments), later increased to 22 euros, announcing in advance that it would consider the offer successful only if it managed to acquire 75 percent of Addiko.

It is not entirely clear, nor logical, why NLB set such a high success threshold for its offer given Addiko’s complex and fragmented ownership structure, further complicated by the fact that another Serbian banker, Davor Macura, has also entered the hunt for shares of that bank (without a public offer), whose two companies purchased a total of 19.62 percent of shares, which, however, he cannot dispose of until the European Central Bank determines whether that purchase was made in accordance with the law.

As a result, all market analysts had doubts about the success of NLB’s offer in advance, which turned out to be the case. NLB secured the purchase of only 36.39 percent of Addiko’s shares and announced that the offer was unsuccessful and calmly withdrew from the story. The only result that NLB achieved with its offer was that it, accidentally or intentionally, spoiled Kostić’s plans.