Dan Sandu, 41, the deputy general manager of Millennium Bank Romania, is going to leave the bank for a position of retail vice-president with MKB Romexterra Bank, market sources say.

At the same time, Florian Kubinschi, 48, still a member of UniCredit Tiriac Bank's Board of Directors, joined the top management team of Romexterra, controlled by Hungary's MKB group (held by Germany's Bayern Landesbank) in the position of vice-president of operations.

In the past three years, Dan Sandu has been in charge with the launch, on the Romanian market, of Portuguese group Millennium's operations, helping build a new bank from scratch.

For this project, in the summer of 2006 he left the position of vice-president at Citibank Romania, after having worked with the bank for 11 years, since the US group's subsidiary was opened, in 2006. "I had almost become a piece of furniture, so I decided to do something else," Sandu said when leaving Citi.

Millennium put him second in command after general manager Jose Toscano, in charge with coordination on the corporate, retail and private banking segments. He directly handled the project of opening 39 branches at once, at the moment the bank entered the market, and the recruitment of the initial team of almost 500 people.

Dan Sandu is now moving to a bank that is making losses because it has not managed to reach the critical business mass to amortise launch investments, to a lending institution that is making losses because of non-performing loan provisions.

According to some banking sources, in mid-2009 MKB Romexterra registered net losses of around 5.5m euros in line with RAS, after having been in the red in 2008, too. Preventing the further deterioration of the loan portfolio became the number one priority in 2009. A fraud prevention unit was also set up at the bank and the credit risk management procedur