SEPI Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales

The Board of Directors of the state-owned holding company Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales (SEPI) has agreed, in the meeting which took place today, to award the shares representing 99.65% of the social capital of IONMED Esterilización, S.A., an affiliated company of ENUSA, to the French company IONISOS S.A.S., for the amount of 5.1 Million Euros. With this privatization it is fulfilled the goal of guaranteeing the continuity of the Company and of the workforce, as well as promoting the industry in Spain, since IONMED becomes part of group with a long experience at European level.

With this purchase, the successful bidder intends to become in the player of reference in Southern Europe. To that end, IONISOS´ project is to continue the work carried out by IONMED in the Spanish market from its current geographical base of Tarancón (Cuenca), as well as to begin, with the market´s growth, an expansion to all the domestic market, which might include both the building of new production facilities and its opening to other sterilization techniques.

IONISOS is a French company, which in the last financial year recorded a sales turnover of more than 13.6 Million Euros, and which was incorporated in 1993 after the merger of the companies CONSERVATOME and AMPHYTRION. In 1997, IONISOS and CARIC merged with the objective of joining two technologies which supplement each other in the irradiation industry: ´Accelerator of electrons (beta rays)´ and ´gamma rays´, and currently have 5 production facilities in France, of which 3 use the gamma technology, while the other 2 use the beta technology. Equally, IONISOS has incorporated another company, Stérylène, for sterilizing through the Ethylene Oxide technology.

The company which is the object of this sale, IONMED Esterilización, is a company in which the capital is wholly Spanish, with head office at Tarancón (Cuenca), incorporated in 1995 with the goal of ameliorating the shortages then existing in Spain in the field of industrial sterilization, for which it has as of today of the most advanced ionization technologies through accelerated electrons (Beta irradiation). It has a 39-strong workforce, with an average age of 35 years, and its main shareholder, 55.88% of the capital, was ENUSA, a company dedicated to the supply of fuel to nuclear power stations, and in which participate SEPI (60%) and the CIEMAT (40%).

Among the services provided by IONMED are those of product sterilization, cleansing or disinfection through high-energy electrons, for such industries as the medical, foodstuffs, veterinary, cosmetics or packaging; and polymer transformation, basically for the textile and the plastics industries (wiring, piping, automotive car parts, etc.). For product handling and storage, it has a plastics laboratory and another for microbiology, and besides it is capable of treating products with a delivery time of less than 12 hours, and it can provide storage and logistics services, as well as those of consulting.

A public, transparent and competitive process

The privatization process of the 99.65% of the capital of the company IONMED has been carried out through the public tender system, whose conditions were approved by SEPI¿s Board of Directors on March 30th, 2007, acting as the external advisor for the transaction the Banco Español de Crédito, S.A. After the public announce of the beginning of this privatization, a total of 17 companies stated their interest and submitted the documentation required for taking part in the process. Of these companies, 12 gained access to detailed information regarding the Company, and visited the facilities. Finally, 3 submitted their final and binding offer.

The privatization process of IONMED has met at all times the publicity, transparency and competition principles set up in the Modernization of the State-Owned Entrepreneurial Sector. The final formalization of this transaction is subjected, as are all the privatization processes, to its authorization by the Council of Ministers, after the previous favorable report of the Consultative Board on Privatizations. Besides, it shall be controlled by the Office of the State Comptroller, the Court of Auditors and the Subcommittee on Privatizations of the Lower House.