Who will pay $14 billion for half of Zain? (Re-post)

The future of Zain, the Arab world's second-largest telco, has been under the spotlight for months now.

After weeks of rumours, it emerged yesterday that the Kharafi Group, a big Kuwaiti family company, has managed to amass 46 per cent of Zain's shares. It may not own them all directly, but it has them for sale. When you take out the KIA, a sovereign fund that owns 25 per cent, and Zain itself, which holds 10 per cent of the company in treasury shares, that means Kharafi have managed to rope up about 70 per cent of all the Zain shares in free float on the market.

That's pretty incredible in and of itself, especially when, as pointed out in The National today, at no point has the Kuwaiti stock market, Zain, or Kharafi actually made a disclosure about any of this. That the second-largest telco in the Arab world - and Kuwait's largest public company - can effectively be bought out without disclosure is a pretty amazing story.

Read here for investors: http://rupertbumfrey.blogspot.com/2009/09/malaysian-indian-group-inks-zain-stake.html