During this morning's trading session on the Malta Stock Exchange, three of the four largest equities by market cap (namely Bank of Valletta plc, International Hotel Investments plc and GO plc) retreated. The declines in each of these equities sent the MSE Share Index 0.6% lower to 3,533.445 points. For the second consecutive session BOV's share price shed €0.02 to close at the €3.35 level on thin volumes. Two trades of 5,000 IHI shares were transacted at the €0.825 level representing a 2.9% drop from yesterday's close.

GO's share price declined by 0.5% to €2.11 on volumes of 13,000 shares. This morning Forthnet, the Greek telecoms company in which GO has an indirect shareholding of almost 20%, issued its financial results for the first quarter of 2010. The results reveal that the Greek company continued to grow its customer base across all of its services. This increase in subscriptions helped Forthnet increase its revenue figure by 10.1% to €99.4 million compared to the same period last year. However the larger increase in marketing and promotion costs incurred to attract these new customers resulted in a 10.1% drop in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) to €16.6 million (Q1 2009: €18.4 million).

Meanwhile the share price of IT company RS2 Software plc continued to recover and gained a further 3.3% this morning to close at the €0.53 level. This equity has gained 12.8% from its recent low of €0.47.

Tomorrow is the deadline for the preferred applicants in the Eden Finance plc bond issue to submit their application form for the new 6.6% Bonds. Meanwhile preferred applicants in the 6% Simonds Farsons Cisk plc Bonds have until Friday to confirm their intention to surrender the maturing bonds in favour of the new issue.

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