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To: NASDBULL who wrote (17799)	11/27/1998 3:11:00 PM
From: Yoav Chudnoff	Respond to of 119973

Why invest in Bulgaria - the time is now: tourism resorts that are always full - - this is the one to go with CAIB Investment Bank Chmn:1998 Loss Well Below ATS500M Dow Jones Newswires VIENNA -- CAIB Investment Bank, a unit of Bank Austria AG (R.BKA), will make a loss of between 100 and 500 million schillings ($1=ATS11.9775) this year, according to its chairman Willi Hemetsberger. Hemetsberger told journalists late Thursday that the loss will be "clearly below ATS500 million" and that rumored reports of larger losses and a capital injection from the parent bank were inaccurate. He explained that the losses had less to do with poor trading performance than with the unit's high cost base, which made the unit unprofitable as fee income from central and eastern Europe dried up in the wake of the Russian crisis earlier this year. Hemetsberger cut around 180 jobs at CAIB after taking over from Andras Simor in the summer. He said Thursday "the cost problem has now been largely solved" but declined to give a profit forecast for 1999. The bulk of Bank Austria's problems in Russia haven't stemmed from CAIB as much as from its credit business and fixed-income activities, which are integrated into the parent bank's treasury. In addition to heavy provisions, the bank is likely to lose around ATS2.5 billion this year through its non-deliverable forward currency agreements. CAIB has now reduced its professional staff in Moscow to 10, Hemetsberger said. "We now have a reasonable cost base and a good deal flow," Hemetsberger said, noting the unit's strength in winning mandates for medium-sized privatization and corporate finance projects. He singled out its successes in Bulgaria, where it has recently won mandates in the privatization of Bulbank, the country's largest bank, as well as other state-owned industrial enterprises.