Bulgarian Finance Ministry Reopens 5-Year BGN-Denominated Bond

Bulgaria's Finance Ministry reopened Tuesday for a second time in the 2013 issue year the 5-year BGN denominated bond, launched on 23.01.2013 with maturity 23.01.2018.

The orders for the auction held on 18 February 2013 amounted to BGN 77.23 M while the amount offered was BGN 45 million, the coverage coefficient being 1.72, the Finance Ministry says in a press release.

All GS primary dealers took part in the auction and traditionally for bonds with such maturity banks acquired 87.16% of the whole amount, followed by pension funds - around 12.22% and other investors.

The yield on the 5-year GS remains stable - 1.99%. The yield achieved is below the yield of bonds with similar characteristics of a number of EU Member States such as Hungary (5.61%), Slovenia (5.26%), Spain (3.86), Romania (3.73%), Croatia (3.73%), Italy (3.20), Latvia (2.10), etc.

Last week, the European Central Bank published data about the long term interest rate to assess the level of convergence of all EU Member States. The data show that in January 2013 the indicator for Bulgaria is 3.27%, which is close to the historically lowest figure of this indicator - 3.22% in November 2012.