Sanima Bank's share trading to resume soon

Share holders of the newly upgraded commercial bank - Sanima Bank - will be able to trade their shares at the stock exchange within the next two weeks.
Trading of then Sanima Bikas Bank had been suspended since 12 June, 2010 when it had formally started the process to upgrade as per Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB)'s order to avoid any plausible manipulation in share prices.
NRB stamped the final approval on the transformation of the national level development bank to the 32nd commercial bank, Sanima Bank, last week.
"We have already written a letter to Nepal Stock Exchange (Nepse) to start the process for the resumption of share trading which will resume within the next couple of weeks," said chief executive of Sanima Bank Kumar Lamsal.
The stock exchange has a listing committee that will determine the come back price of the bank's shares as it has asked for the resumption of trading, said an official at Nepse, adding that the price will be fixed according to Nepse' calculation mechanism.
The last share price of the bank stood at Rs 497 per share before closing of its trading. Since then the bank has issued rights shares that tend to bring down share prices, so we can expect the opening price to be lower than the last traded price, said Lamsal.
The central bank regulation requires financial institutions seeking to upgrade or merge to suspend their share trading at Nepse.
Earlier, when NMB Bank, DCBL Bank and Kist Bank were still finance companies and looking to upgrade to commercial banks, share prices of these institutions were manipulated, pushing prices unnaturally high.
Sanima was established as a national level development bank in 2004 and is promoted by Non Resident Nepalis. The bank's annual general meeting had decided to upgrade the development bank to a commercial bank in December 2009. In order to increase the capital to Rs two billion, it had issued rights shares on the basis of 1:1.5 ratio.
The bank then had a paid up capital of Rs 806 million. Subsequent bonus and rights issues have raised the bank's paid up capital to Rs 2.02 billion as per the requirement set by the central bank for a class 'A' financial institution.