"Aga", as an abbreviation of the term "General Shareholder Assembly", is an ambiguous word, due to the well known fact that the Turks held major influence throughout history in the three medieval Romanian states, when it also received the meaning of "boss" (its Turkish etymology indicates it means "agha = big brother"); a bit of each of these three meanings applies to the two AGAs scheduled today by the Bucharest and Sibiu Exchanges; even though they had initially been scheduled simultaneously in order to allow for their glorious merger to take place, the latter may very well fail pathetically due to fierce infighting between their respective shareholders over the attempts to replace the management of the two exchanges.

* THE AGA OF FARMACHE

The resignation of Daniel Ţepeş from the Board of the BSE, which occurred on March 25th, has left a vacant spot which will need to be occupied through the vote of the General Shareholder Meeting, as well as to provide the opportunity (awaited by about a third of the shareholders of the BSE, who say that they are unhappy with the current management of the Bucharest Stock Exchange) to raise the issue of replacing the entire board of Directors; on April 15th, several investors and brokerage firms calling themselves the "April group" and who together hold 30% of the BSE, have proposed the introduction of the cumulative vote at the General Shareholder Meeting, of April 29th, a date when the new member of the Board of Directors of the BSE, Gregorz Konieczny, (who was temporarily appointed after the resignation of Daniel Ţepeş) was supposed to be validated.

In a communiqué of April 18th, the Board of Directors of the BSE said that it was rejecting the request for the introduction of the cumulative vote due to flaws in the way it was formulated, (which is probably true), but which makes no mention whatsoever of the clea