ALSE exchange sees trading start by year end: CEO Gjergji tells Reuters in an interview

Reuters news agency has published a piece about the first Albanian Securities Exchange, highlighting the main challenges that it is expected to overcome.

“A new, private securities exchange in Albania should be up and running by year end after getting the central bank’s go-ahead”, ALSE chief executive Artan Gjergji to Reuters in an interview.

It will start with trading government debt and then move on to other assets, said Gjergji.

The goal is to create a capital market in Albania, which is still struggling to modernise a quarter of a century after a particularly insular style of communism ended. It was followed almost immediately by unrest linked to a collapsed pyramid schemes.

With the long-dormant Tirana Stock Exchange now suspended, ALSE was brought into being by a group of Albanian financial market professionals backed by three Albanian-owned banks, primarily Credins Bank.

“We shall be ready legally and technically by November and shall go live hopefully within this year, and we shall invite all the banks and brokers to trade, for now, treasury bills and bonds,” Gjergji said.

“By March, before the next summer, we shall welcome them to trade all other kinds of securities, list shares, an IPO or corporate bonds of Albanian companies, which might have the potential to get listed,” he said.

Gjergji pinned its failure on successive governments for not trading or privatising shares of state-owned companies in the previous stock exchange, like “other post-communist governments from neighbouring Macedonia to Moscow” did.

”All the elements were there, only the bourse was missing. It is not going to be easy, but we have now done most of the job, and businesses are starting to get interested about the bourse,” Gjergji said.

SCAN

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