Raiffeisen Plans to Relocate Employees to Eastern Hungary

Raiffeisen Bank International AG (RBI), eastern Europe’s third-biggest lender, is planning to relocate staff to eastern Hungary.

The jobs are back office, spokesman Michael Palzer said in an e-mailed response to questions. “This is a move of staff, not a creation of new jobs.”

The bank’s Hungarian unit said earlier today in an invitation to a press conference that it plans to hire “several hundred” people in the eastern city of Nyiregyhaza, with details due at 3 p.m.

The Hungarian banking sector was unprofitable in 2011 for the first time in 13 years, after banks were hit by losses on foreign-currency loans and by Europe’s highest bank levy. Raiffeisen had a 355 million-euro loss in the country last year. The Vienna-based lender cut 8 percent of jobs in Hungary in 2011 and said in March that it plans further reductions this year.

To contact the reporters on this story: Boris Groendahl in Vienna at bgroendahl@bloomberg.net; Zoltan Simon in Budapest at zsimon@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Frank Connelly at fconnelly@bloomberg.net