#SaudiArabia Pays More Aramco IPO Fees as Wall Street Misses Out - Bloomberg

Saudi Arabia Pays More Aramco IPO Fees as Wall Street Misses Out - Bloomberg

Saudi Arabia recently paid around $50 million of extra fees to banks on the record-breaking listing of state oil company Aramco, with most of the cash going to local underwriters after Wall Street firms were sidelined, people familiar with the matter said.

The discretionary incentive fee -- doled out to reward banks for the amount of orders they brought in -- was transferred to arrangers of the 2019 share sale in the last couple months, according to the people. The payments totalled about 0.25% of the money raised from institutional investors, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private.

The additional money brings the sum that the kingdom paid to the banks on the $29.4 billion initial public offering to just over $100 million, a tiny figure sum by global standards. T-Mobile US Inc. paid roughly twice that amount last year for a share sale that was about half the size of the Aramco offering, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

It wasn’t immediately clear why it took Saudi Arabia so long after the IPO to pay the final fees. Aramco declined to comment.