Valentin Ionescu has come to the end of his term as a general manager of the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE), following yesterday's decision of the Board of the Exchange, which, unusually, met for the second time in a week, just three days after Monday's meeting, when, according to the Communiqué, a review of the "financial and operating results for the first ten months" and of certain aspects of the activities of the Executive had been conducted.

The decision to dismiss Valentin Ionescu shows that the Board of the Exchange was not happy with the findings of its Monday review, and so ended the extension of his term, which had been renewed on September 27th.

The Board of the BSE continued to blame Valentin Ionescu for his part in the failure of the secondary public offering of "Petrom" of July (even though, just as much of the blame lies with the members of the Board, and especially with the president of the BSE, who disappeared in a condemnable manner, at the time the offering was taking place).

Yesterday's press release of the BSE records the opinion of the Council that the General Manager only reached 10% of his "main contractual target", which of course, hints at the disappointing financial performance of the BSE, as well as the low level of restructuring of the institution.

The thing which weighed heavily in yesterday's meeting was the fact that Valentin Ionescu did not downsize the team of the BSE, as he hired new people on the positions which were left vacant, and that the employees who were hired had credible reasons to go to court over their dismissals.

At the end of July, the management of the Exchange had announced that it was eyeing a 10 to 20% reduction in operating costs across the group, and that those reductions would be performed by outsourcing some operations, renegotiating contracts, increasing the efficiency of the staf