Banca Naţională a României

Financial Sector Coordination Meeting on Romania
Held at the Joint Vienna Institute on March 26, 2009, Vienna

Concluding Statement by Participating Banks

We, the parent institutions of the nine largest foreign-owned banks incorporated in Romania, with a market share of 70 percent of assets, met in Vienna, Austria, on March 26, 2009, at the invitation of the Joint Vienna Institute (JVI). The meeting took place under the chairmanship of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), with the participation of the European Commission (EC), the World Bank Group, the EBRD, the EIB, the National Bank of Romania (NBR), the home country banking supervisors and ministries of finance (Austria, France, Greece and Italy), and in the presence of the European Central Bank.

We agreed on the following considerations and conclusions:

1. We accept with satisfaction the shared analysis of the NBR, the IMF Romania team and the EC that all banks in Romania are currently in good financial condition, and that the parent banks of the foreign-owned Romanian banks have so far behaved responsibly, providing their Romanian affiliates with capital, funding, managerial and other types of expertise as the need arose.
2. The IMF, the EC and the World Bank are in the process of finalizing a balance of payments support package for Romania. We welcome this important development that will ensure the consolidation of macro-economic and financial stability in Romania.
3. We are aware that the success of the macroeconomic program, as well as medium term balance of payments sustainability in Romania will also be favorably enhanced by the continued involvement of the foreign-owned banks.
4. We entered the Romanian market as strategic investors and key contributors to its transition toward an open, market-based economy, based on our assessment of and continued confidence in the country's long-term growth prospects. We have made substantial investments in Romania over a number of years, and we remain committed to doing business in the country.
5. We are aware that it is in our collective interest and in the interest of Romania for all of us to subscribe to coordinated commitments to maintain our overall exposure to Romania.
6. We also acknowledge that our subsidiaries in Romania will have to adjust to the current challenging economic environment. A need for additional capital cannot be excluded, and will be provided as necessary.
7. We have taken note of the agreement reached between the IMF and the NBR to run stress-tests based on established IMF methodology to estimate the potential losses that the Romanian banks might face under diverse scenarios during the period of the IMF/EU program. We support this exercise and agree to support our Romanian subsidiaries in order to: (i) confirm that these affiliates current good financial standing will be preserved throughout the period of market turbulences and economic slowdown; (ii) demonstrate our long-term commitment to the development of the Romanian economy; and (iii) signal our willingness to contribute to the efforts of the international community to put in place a comprehensive and well-coordinated response to the crisis.
8. We are therefore prepared to make these commitments, within the framework of the multilateral support programs, on a bilateral basis with the BNR, and with the involvement of our home country supervisory authorities, according to European and the respective national regulatory frameworks.

Erste Bank Raiffeisen International
Eurobank EFG
National Bank of Greece
Unicredit
Société Générale
Alpha Bank
Volksbank
Piraeus Bank