SEPI Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales

The Board of Directors of the state-owned company Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales (SEPI) agreed, on the extraordinary meeting which it celebrated yesterday, the sale of 5,882,959 shares of Altadis, S.A., owned by this state-owned company, through the ´Bought Deal´ procedure. These shares come from the so-called ´green shoe´ which was not exercised in Tabacalera´s Initial Public Offering (IPO) and which took place in April 1998.

The Board also agreed to award this sale to Deutsche Bank, since it submitted the best financial offer, out of a total of four financial entities, ranked for this deal by this very Board of Directors on May 27th, 2005. As a result of the financial bid submitted, the sale price of each of the shares is, before commissions, of 34.57 Euros, which represents a total amount of 203,373,892.63 Euros.

The sale procedure has the positive report of the Consultative Board of Privatizations, made over the above mentioned Tabacalera´s IPO, and was authorized by the Council of Ministers on March 27th, 1998. The award to Deutsche Bank has been positively assessed by the deal´s advisor, Analistas Financieros Internacionales (AFI).

The divestment of SEPI´s financial stake in Altadis was announced by Mr. Enrique Martínez Robles, Chairman of this state-owned holding company, in his intervention before the Budgetary Commission and the Commission for Economy and the Treasury in the Chamber of Deputies, on October 2004 and on February 2005, respectively.