| Headline: Austria Source: Euromoney Date: July 2001 Best bank Bank Austria Best debt house CSFB Best equity house CA IB Best M&A house Goldman Sachs It was something of a shock for Austrians to wake up one morning last July and discover that the country’s dominant bank, Bank Austria, had been acquired by Munich-based HypoVereinsbank. Since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, Austrian banks have spread out across central and eastern Europe buying and building dominant banking businesses across the region. Now it was the turn of Austrians to fret about seeing their banking system fall under foreign control. Bank Austria now stands, still under its former chairman Gerhard Randa, who has been appointed to the HypoVereinsbank managing board, as the lead company in Austria and central Europe for HypoVereinsbank, the self-styled bank of the regions. In fact the acquisition, painful though it may have been to national pride and worrying in the light of the acquirer’s real estate loan problems, scarcely alters the Austrian banking industry at all. Bank Austria would like to claim that it stands to benefit by gaining access to more capital and more expertise as part of the HypoVereinsbank group. |