Vietnam's Sacombank chairman to buy 2 mln shares
HANOI, Feb 20 (Reuters) - The chairman of Sacombank STB.HM, Vietnam's sixth-largest lender and its largest listed firm, plans to buy two million shares in the bank from the market next week, the stock exchange said on Wednesday.
The purchase of the stock, which has fallen 14.5 percent this year, should raise chairman Dang Van Thanh's holding in the Ho Chi Minh City-based bank to 3.69 percent, the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange .VNI said in a statement.
It gave no reason for the purchase, due to start on Monday.
Shares in Sacombank, or Saigon Thuong Tin Commercial Bank as it is named formally, fell 4.27 percent to 56,000 dong ($3.48) on Wednesday in line with the broader market.
The stock has fallen despite the bank saying last month that its gross profit soared 157 percent from a year earlier to 157 billion dong.
The Vietnam stock market closed down 4.1 percent on Wednesday at 744.92 points, its lowest since January 2, 2007, but the market was smaller then than it is now.
Traders and investment fund managers said the fall followed central bank measures to tighten lending to fight inflation, which hit 14.1 percent last month from a year earlier, its highest in more than a decade, and well above other emerging markets in Asia.
The World Bank's International Finance Corp sold 5.95 million shares in Sacombank last month, cutting its ownership to 6.29 percent from 7.63 percent.
Before the sale, the IFC, Dragon Capital and ANZ Bank (ANZ.AX) owned a combined 30 percent of Sacombank, the ceiling for foreign ownership of listed banks in Vietnam. ($1=16,070 dong) (Reporting by Ho Binh Minh; Editing by Michael Battye, Valerie Lee)
