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28 March 2024

Du Caire sale by June-end

(CRAIG SCARR)

Published
By Reuters

Egypt hopes to sell a stake in Banque du Caire by the end of June to five short-listed banks and one of them is Dubai's Mashreq Bank , Eygptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif said yesterday.

"There is a short-list of five banks and I hope [it will be sold] by the end of June, or mid-July," Nazif told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.

Egypt has said it would it would sell up to 67 per cent of the Banque du Caire, the country's third-largest lender. Apart from Mashreqbank, other banks vying for the stake include UK-based Standard Chartered, Saudi Arabia's Samba Financial Group, National Bank of Greece and a consortium of Saudi Arabia's Arab National Bank and its Jordanian affiliate Arab Bank Group.

Egypt has said it would sell the stake in a public auction, with an additional 28 per cent offered in an IPO on the Egyptian stock exchange after the stake sale. Five percent of shares will go to the bank's employees.

Banque du Caire has about a six per cent market share in terms of both assets and deposits and was initially slated to merge operations with Banque Misr under a plan to create fewer banks that could compete more vigorously and tackle bad debts.

Egypt sold a majority stake in Bank of Alexandria in October 2006 to Italy's Sanpaolo for about $1.6bn (Dh5.8bn) in what was one of Egypt's largest privatisations of the year and a landmark move in reducing the role of the state in the Egyptian economy.