* Niţă: "It is hard to tell whether we could have gotten a higher price in the IPO of Romgaz"

The IPO of Romgaz has split the Romanian stock market down the middle. An important part of the market community considers the IPO a success. The other party criticizes the authorities for choosing the dual listing on the Bucharest Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange. Critics are saying that the IPO of the natural gas producer showed that 5-600 million Euros could have been raised easily from the domestic stock market alone and there was no need to issue GDRs (global depository receipts) in London.

When asked yesterday on how what his response was to the criticisms brought to this IPO, the delegate minister for energy, Constantin Niţă, said: "No one has the ability to foresee exactly how an IPO will go. The high degree of oversubscription took us by surprise. We knew there was a general interest in Romgaz, but nobody was able to predict it would be that high. It is hard to say now whether the oversubscription was caused by the good price in the IPO or if we could have obtained a higher price. We started off from the comparison with other companies in the market. Or, the other major natural gas maker is Petrom. It was hard to believe that we could have gone with a higher price than the quotation of Petrom".

The strategy of the authorities was to use a dual listing in order to attract major players from the international markets to the Romanian stock market.

In the opinion of the officials, the BSE stands to gain from this operation, and Constantin Niţă wants Electrica and Hidroelectrica to conduct IPOs that follow the Romgaz model next year. The difference will be that those operations will involve share capital increases, and the money will go to the companies for investments.

"Romanian energy companies in the energy sector are no less