A fund controlled by Lion Capital and Longshield Investment has reached an 11% stake in Infinity Capital

FIA Active Plus, an investment fund managed by Swiss Capital Asset Management and whose units are almost entirely owned by Lion Capital and Longshield Investment Group, has reached an 11% stake in Infinity Capital Investments, according to reports from the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB).

Infinity Capital Investments is the former SIF Oltenia, while Lion Capital and Longshield Investment Group are the former SIF Banat-Crişana and SIF Muntenia. At the end of the first quarter of this year, Lion Capital held 55.9% of the fund units of FIA Active Plus, while Longshield Investment Group had 42.4%, the cumulative holding being thus 98.3% of the fund, as shown in the reports of the two former SIFs at BVB. Lion Capital controls Longshield Investment Group because it owns the administrator of SAI Muntenia Invest, so that the former SIF Banat-Crişana de facto controls FIA Active Plus because the existence of the fund practically depends on its investments.

In the middle of this month, the fund under the Swiss Capital umbrella had reached a holding of 11.02% of Infinity Capital Investments, compared to 9.98% as it had in the previous report.

FIA Active Plus is one of the interposed funds through which the former SIF Banat-Crişana and SIF Mutenia took over the management of the former SIF Oltenia in a hostile manner. In practice, the two SIFs financed a constellation of funds owned by other managers, thus ending up directly and indirectly owning over 30% of SIF Oltenia, when there was still a 5% ownership threshold.

But the Financial Supervisory Authority argued in one of its reports that there was no collusion because the fund managers are independent of those who finance them. Shortly after the takeover of the former SIF Oltenia by the former SIF Banat-Crişana and SIF Muntenia, the Pilon II pension funds fled from the shareholders of the financial investment company that was then headquartered in Craiova.

For the first three months of this year, Infinity Capital Investments reported a net loss of 9.1 million lei, compared to a profit of 29.8 million lei in the first quarter of last year. At the end of May, the company's net asset value amounted to about 3.5 billion lei, which compared to the fund's current stock market valuation of almost 1.1 billion lei, is equivalent to a trading discount of 70%.