Banking briefs

Parex Bank has decided to increase capital by 6 million lats (9.2 million euros) to 64.7 million lats in its second closed emission of shares this year. Subscription for the shares will take place from Oct. 24 to Dec. 15, and the price per share will be higher than that of the previous emission, or 2.10 per share. According to a bank statement, this will be the last emission for a while, or at least until Parex Bank reregisters as an open holding company in the commercial enterprise register next year.
In the not-too-distant future Parex, the biggest commercial bank in Latvia by assets wants to have its shares quoted on an international stock exchange, according to Valery Kargin, bank president.

Outstanding loans to private persons in Estonia went up by a record 779 million kroons (50 million euros) in September. According to Eesti Pank, the country's central bank, this set a record since the previous figure of 613 million kroons in July 2003. By the end of September, Estonian banks had issued 17.1 billion kroons (1.1 billion euros) in loans to private persons, up by 46 percent from the same period last year. Total loans, which includes all borrowers, increased by 1 billion kroons to 60.8 billion kroons.
Over the past year the volume of deposits has increased by only 11 percent.

The Hansabank Group's board has set the goals for group operations until 2007 that aim to set the bank on a European path. According to a bank statement, the financial market has changed considerably since the bank adopted its previous four-year strategy in 1999 and that the bank's market share now exceeds 30 percent, and its customer base - 3.5 million people.
"The Baltic countries are set to join the European Union in 2004 and the monetary union a few years later. The convergence to the European financial markets is already well under way. It is therefore not sufficient anymore to be the best in the Baltic countries. We have to be competitive in the European context," the bank said in its statement.

The Bank of Lithuania said that it was working on an expanded version of the loan risk database used by commercial banks. The database will include all the legal entities that have borrowed more than 50,000 litas (15,000 euros), and its new version should be launched in March 2004. The present information on debtors will be supplemented with their financial data.