Sunday 1 July 2012

Arab investment firm MerchantBridge left in limbo - The National

The future of MerchantBridge, one of the largest private equity investors in Iraq, is in question a year after the death of two of its founders and a messy legal dispute over one of its holdings.

Founded by Basil Al Rahim and other wealthy Arabs in 2001, MerchantBridge has served as a conduit for investments by big names such as Qatar National Bank, Qatar Telecom and Lafarge Cement in Iraq as the country emerges from decades of war and sanctions.

But Al Rahim and partner Abdullah Lahoud died when the company's private jet crashed en route from Sulaimaniyah, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, to Beirut in February last year, triggering a legal dispute over a 19 per cent stake in Asiacell, an Iraqi mobile telecommunications company.

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