New Euro Printer in Bulgaria

[chrisild]

Seems that we have a new euro printing facility in the euro area. But since the European Central Bank does (apparently) not update the list of printing works any more and the European Commission does not provide that info either, there has been some guessing in the past few days.

Yesterday somebody at eurobilltracker.com wanted to enter a new €10 note but could not do that, because of the "unknown" F code in the serial number. So far that "F" has been unassigned. Not any more though - it now means Oberthur Fiduciaire AD.

The first two parts of the company name sound familiar; Oberthur has been printing euro notes in France for many years. But AD? Well, these ones come from Bulgaria - the printing facility in Sofia is a joint venture of Oberthur (70%) and the Bulgarian central bank (30%). And the Bundesbank in Germany just had a couple million €10 notes made there, see the tender here ("Section V: Award of contract").

So Oberthur in Sofia got a contract about making 424 million €10 notes. Date of conclusion was in August 2018. All fine, but I still wonder (and asked the EC) whether a current list of printers is considered classified info these days. After all, the ECB still says (scroll down to Printing works and letters) that the F is unassigned ...

Christian

[stef]

They have a permission to print euro notes since May 2017, but the only information about the letter F that I could find is a short note here.