BOR’s wealth can compare to that of the largest players in the Romanian economy, such as Petrom, member of Austria’s largest listed industrial company and leading Central European oil and gas group OMV (which has a market value of €8.3 billion), Banca Comerciala Romana, largest Romanian lender (over €6 billion when Erste Group bought the bank in 2005), and BRD Société Générale (with a €5.6 billion market value).
If we consider that BOR is due to reclaim 200,000 hectares of wooded area, whose value is estimated at €5 billion, and other objects currently kept in museums or part of Moscow’s treasure, the latter claimed by the Romanian state, the church’s wealth could exceed €10 billion.
BOR’s revenues are estimated at an annual €90 million, most of which comes from the Metropolitanate of Moldavia and Bukovina, followed by the Metropolitanate of Oltenia, whose representatives are the likely successors for the position of Patriarch. The Wall Street Journal valuated the declared annual revenues of the Vatican at some €200 million in 2005.
The Romanian Orthodox Church has 18.8 million believers (85 percent of the entire population of Romania, according to the last census in 2002), over 40,000 hectares of arable land, some 40,000 hectares of wooded land, owns share packages in more than 15 companies in the hotel, energy, lumber, construction, agricultural, transport, publishing and printing houses fields, and has approximately 27 radio licenses.
