Ahab unlikely to share 'personal affairs'

Family offices of the troubled Saudi groups Ahmad Hamad Algosaibi and Brothers (Ahab) and Saad Group should not be expected to share details of their "personal affairs", said a senior executive of Deloitte. The consultancy firm is advising the Algosaibi group.

Terming it "completely wrong" to blame the family offices of the Saudi groups for the crisis, Neven Hendricks, Chief Operating Officer for Mena, Deloitte, told Emirates Business: "I saw media tearing the family offices apart and blaming them for the crisis and unfairly so. There is no compulsion for a family to tell the world about its personal affairs. It is like asking me to show my personal tax returns. I think that is unfair for the public to expect private families to behave like that."

Recently, S&P had said that the gross exposure of GCC banks to the Saad and Algosaibi groups is about $9.6bn (Dh35.2bn) while Standard Chartered said Saudi banks have almost $5bn exposure. According to analysts, it may take banks at least another quarter to completely write off these provisions. The exposure of banks to the Saad and Al Gosaibi brought forth the issue of lending to conglomerates that had "family names" attached to them.