CSE Tumbles As Bank Of Cyprus Announces Dwindling Profits

by Philip Morton, Investors Offshore.com

02 September 2002

The CSE took a tumble on Thursday when the exchange's largest listed company, Bank of Cyprus released figures for the first half of this year.

BoC hit investors with a 'double whammy' on Thursday, announcing a two-thirds drop in profits in the period to June, and revealing that shareholders would be receiving no dividend this year, which disrupted the period of relative calm enjoyed by the troubled bourse recently.

The Cyprus Stock Exchange's share price index soared to dizzy heights in 1999 before crashing to barely 10% of its peak level, and confidence has never fully been restored, although recent plans to create a trust which would offer to assume all the investor debts created between January 1, 1999 and December 31, 2001, as well as the investor losses sustained in the same period, thus relieving thousands of investors who lost money after the CSE bubble burst, may go some way to restoring investors' belief in the CSE.

However, for the moment at least, traded volumes remain stubbornly below the £1 million mark.

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