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Article: A hare and tortoise story.
- Article from:
- The Banker
- Article date:
- December 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 FT Business. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: Edward Russell-Walling
As the hares - well, those hares that survive - lick their wounds, this is the day of the tortoise. No one is suggesting that Austria's Raiffeisen Zentralbank (RZB) is a plodder but, in the scheme of things gone by, its business model is definitely conservative. When it asked shareholders for more capital recently, this was no knee-jerk response to an emergency but simply the final step in a three-year plan.
"When we announced the rights issue, some people said 'RZB must need capital'," says Patrick Butler, member of the board at RZB. "In fact, it was the third and final tranche of a programme that had to be voted on each ...