EFG-Hermes Holding SAE said Qatar’s QInvest LLC may hold a majority stake in a planned investment bank that would take over the Egyptian bank’s brokerage, investment banking and asset management businesses.
The investment bank would be the largest in “the Arab World, Africa, Turkey, South and South East Asia, with the possibility of QInvest holding majority stake,” Cairo-based EFG-Hermes said in a statement today. QInvest, a unit of Qatar Islamic Bank (QIBK), concluded talks to buy a 60 percent stake in EFG- Hermes, Egypt’s Al Shorouk newspaper reported yesterday, citing an unidentified person familiar with the talks.
The investment may help EFG-Hermes ride Egypt’s worst political and economic crisis in at least 30 years after last year’s popular uprising. Profit of the largest publicly traded Arab investment bank slumped 81 percent slump in 2011 and its shares plunged 63 percent, under-performing the benchmark index. The shares gained 9 percent, the most since Nov. 29, to 14.01 pounds at the 2:30 p.m. close in Cairo, valuing the company at 6.7 billion pounds ($1.1 billion).
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