Winery shareholders suspect managers of trying to illegally sell stocks

A number of shareholders of the “Cimislia” SA winery are concerned with and accuse the company’s executives of attempting to illicitly sell the majority interest to the company “Acorex Wine Holding.” After more requests of the shareholders, the transactions have been blocked by the National Financial Market Commission (NFMC) till March 6, when a relevant decision is to be taken, Info-Prim Neo reports. “Cimislia” SA is a wine-making complex comprising 4 grape-processing factories with a capacity of 60,000 tonnes. The Cimislia Town Hall holds half of the shares. The entity remains a closed end company, before the majority interest is sold out. Two stocks of the venture were bought by “Acorex” in 2004. At a news conference on Wednesday, March 5, the Cimislia mayor, Gheorghe Raileanu, said the manager of the winery, Timofei Tapordei, had started the procedure of selling the stocks on December 22. The mayor says the shareholders are manipulated, deceived and menaced to be fired unless they sell their stocks. Within a short time, during the Winter holidays, “Acorex Wine Holding” managed to purchase 28.8% of “Cimislia” SA, at a price of 100 a piece, the par value being 1,000 lei. Gheorghe Raileanu says later almost all the former shareholders applied to cancel the transaction, as none of them holds any selling-purchase or estrangement papers. The people were compelled to sell off their stocks since none of them received dividends for three years and any salary during 7 months, Gheorghe Raileanu said. The shareholders notified the prosecutor’s office, the police, the Financial Market Commission and the Parliament. On March 5, the shareholders team filed a lawsuit on the matter. The Cimislia mayor is confident the winery manager has been plotting “the corrupted scheme” for more years and is backed by the central authorities. That would be the reason why all the authorities tergiversate to consider the case, ignoring the shareholders, says Gheorghe Raileanu. The former manager of one of the factories within the complex, Nicolae Zdravcov, has told of other “breaches committed by the executive.” According to him, in 2000 Timofei Tapordei sold of over 4,000 stocks without informing the shareholders, and later was sanctioned. In 2001, the employees were impelled to sign rent contracts on yielding their land-quotas to the company for 25 years, as the disloyal ones were later sacked en masse. Nicolae Zdravcov points out that, once a Soviet model, now the company is in a disastrous state. The vineyards are not trimmed, the children holiday “Struguras” is destroyed. A former employee, now a shareholder of the wine-making complex, Valentina Gribinic, has said the factories lay in ruin, the metal, the oak barrels and the aluminum cisterns are surreptitiously sold. The winery’s 200 ha of vineyard have not been trimmed this year. The land in front of them was hastily tidied up only last year before the visit of President Vladimir Voronin to the district, when Tapordei was awarded the Order of the Republic, says the former employee. The leadership of Cimislia district complains of the deplorable situation the company is in now, as it used to be the district’s largest tax-payer. Last year, the factories processed only 600 tonnes of grapes, and the vine-growers from the district had to sell their grapes to companies from other districts, said district president Andrei Vacarciuc. “Cimislia” SA was set up in December 1994, on the basis of the state enterprise “Iantar.”