KNF unlikely to approve BPH sale

It is highly unlikely that the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) will approve the sale of Bank BPH by GE to any bank operating in Poland, the watchdog’s vice-president Wojciech Kwaśniak told Reuters in an interview. Soon after the announcement by GE that it could sell the Polish bank, KNF head Andrzej Jakubiak said that a potential buyer should have debt rating at least equal to that of GE (AA+ according to Standard & Poor's). “This is a problem of GE, not of the supervisor,” Kwaśniak said. “We have always said that from the point of view of banking supervision ... it is extremely important in conditions of unstable financial markets, and this is still the case, not to swap better investors for inferior ones,” he explained.