Powszechny Bank Kredytowy
Former Polish bank
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Powszechny Bank Kredytowy (lit. 'General Credit Bank'), also known as Bank PBK, was a bank based in Warsaw, Poland. It was established in 1988-1989 by spinoff from the National Bank of Poland, and eventually merged in 2001 with Bank BPH to form Bank BPH-PBK.
Overview
Bank PBK was one of nine regional banks spun off from the National Bank of Poland, the culmination of a sequence of reforms during the 1980s that brought an end to the country's single-tier banking system.[1]: 18 It was legally established in April 1988 and started operations on 1 January 1989. Its first president was Ewa Kawecka-Włodarczak.[2] Its name evoked a former affiliate of Vienna's Länderbank, also named Powszechny Bank Kredytowy (German: Allgemeine Kreditbank), which had been establish in 1910 in Austrian Galicia and relocated from there to Warsaw in 1926.[3]: 261
On 8 October 1991, Bank PBK was transformed into a joint-stock company, fully owned by the Polish State Treasury.[citation needed] By the mid-1990s it was the seven-largest Polish bank overall behind PKO Bank Polski, Bank Pekao, Bank Handlowy, Bank BGŻ, Bank PBG, and Bank Śląski.[1]: 18 In 1995, Vienna-based Creditanstalt acquired 13 percent of Bank PBK's shares in a partial privatization process. Also in 1995, Bank PBK took a 54.4-percent stake in Górnośląski Bank Gospodarczy (Bank GBG).[4] In 1997, it absorbed operations from the troubled Bank Morski, and in 1998, from Pierwszy Komercyjny Bank w Lublinie.[5]
The ownership stake of Creditanstalt, by then controlled by Bank Austria, in Bank PBK increased to reach 57 percent in 2000. In June of that year, Bank Austria-Creditanstalt announced that it would merge its own Polish subsidiary into Bank PBK.[6] In 2001, Bank Austria had itself come under the control of Munich-based HypoVereinsbank (HVB) which decided to merge Bank PBK with its own Polish subsidiary Bank BPH to form Bank Przemysłowo-Handlowy PBK.[7] The merged entity, also known as Bank BPH-PBK, was the third-largest bank in Poland by assets at the time.
