Sunday 22 November 2009

Bahraini banker calls for industry consolidation

The Chairman of Bahrain's Ithmaar Bank, Khalid Abdulla-Janahi, is here in Dubai for the World Economic Forum's Summit on the Global Agenda and so I had a chance to catch up with him briefly and hear his views.

Mr Abdulla-Janahi has appeared in this blog before, in particular his views on the schadenfreude over Dubai in the Gulf, and on the responsibility of sovereign wealth funds to invest in their home turf.

Mr Abdulla-Janahi is here in his capacity as Vice-Chairman of the Global Agenda Council on the Future of the Middle East. One of his recommendations so far is for a consolidation of regional banks. "Financial institutions should get together in order to survive," he told me. "This is a must." Regulators have been taking it easy on the banks, he believes. If they enforced their own rules on lending limits and capital adequacy, he said, "a lot of banks would have failed by now."

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