SWF's regulation-a US fantasy?

Brad Setser has put up an interesting article on why sovereign wealth funds may have an upper hand over the Henry Paulson's team [Share]

Wipro bidding for CapGemini

India's number-three software exporter, Wipro will make a bid for France's Capgemini by the end of February in a deal that puts a $6.4 billion to $7 price tag on the company.Shares of Capgemini rose over 9% in Paris trading on the report. Investment advisors Citigroup and HSBC have been frantically trying to finalize a plan for financing the deal before year-end. "Details about leveraged buyout financing and other options were discussed," a banker close to the deal said.

Analysts say Capgemini would give Wipro a strong foothold in the consulting business. “Capgemini has a good presence in Europe and it would help Wipro to insulate itself from the weak dollar earnings,” said one analyst. Another expressed concerns about integration. Paris-based Capgemini has units in North America, northern, central and southern Europe, and Asia Pacific, as well as India. It boasts 75,000 employees.

From Flying Carpets to Flying Palaces !!

Supposedly Prince Waleed will not be the only one to get the Airbus A-380 private jet aka 'Flying Palace' in this region.

Airbus Industries is being bombarded with requests/orders from the middle east on the VIP jet.One of the them includes the Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed.

Business families in the region are all in the waiting line that may take the corporation 2 to 2.5 years to build and deliver depending on the level of customization requested.

Let the good times begin for Airbus :)

Pictures courtesy Bornich.org - More here

Laptop Woes et al.

The laptop has been out of commission.It just won't boot up no more.Although its too early to write a orbituary, I do see myself getting rid of a few hardware (already in process). So with the big weekend (national day -liberation day ) going on heres a few things we didn't cover.


-Etisalat announces Max 3.5 data package

-Kuwait announces salary increase for government employees (both citizens &expats)-the population isn't happy ( what's new)

-Bahrain and UAE are considering revaluation of their respective currency,following increaseing construction worker strikes.

-Boy were we having a time here in Kuwait with a lot of people trying to subscribe to the Ajman Bank IPO (close to $150 million is being raised).

- Qatar Investment Authority is looking to inject money into Royal Bank of Scotland, only this time there has been no explicit solicitation of interest by the bank-this will be interesting to monitor !

That should cover the major items-more soon

IPOs in the GCC

I attended a presentation today done by a tech solution company out of Dubai that specializes in the automation process of IPO management for banks.

There was a lot of things that in the IPO process that I didn't know and was glad to learn at this session. It also showed the focus that countries such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were having towards getting their stuff together to make the process of subscribing to a share using channels such as the ATM , net banking and even SMS.

The road map laid out by the speaker envisioned the ability of a GCC citizen to be able to subscribe to shares across borders.Saudi Arabia had recently announced a bylaw that enabled GCC citizens to buy shares in certain companies. Qatar will join the bandwagon soon.

The stumbling blocks currently include Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman , although the Central Bank of Kuwait recently has started looking at ways to go into the online process.

Well time for me to prepare a summary now ..

Qatar to buy stake in Credit Suisse

Talk about a government on a roll, the Qatar Investment Authority will be purchasing 5% stake (worth $3 billion) in the Swiss bank. [Share]

A few weeks back there was a report on the QIA's interest in purchasing Borse Dubai's stake in the London Stock Exchange.

Flipping burgers or Crunchin Numbers?

Mergers & Inquisition , a financial blog has an interesting article that compares salaries made @ Mc Donalds v/s i-banking and the insights are , well , insightful.[Share]

Citi ibanking heads for Beijing

Citigroup has signed a mainland investment banking joint venture with China ahead of the sector expected opening according to The Financial Times.

The China investment announcement continues to set the stage for the Chinese government to relax the current ban on foreign investment in China’s securities industry.

Nonetheless, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley both signed similar China investment agreement last month and Goldman Sachs and UBS signed their deals prior to the ban two years ago.

DP World sets eyes on Sokhna

DP world had a controversial 2007 with the whole DP World Accquistion attempt in the US. Although the showdown didn't work in their favour, it hasn't stopped them from continuing to strengthen their hold in regional accquisitons..

Tomorrow, officials from DP world will be signing a $670 million deal to accquire Sokhna Ports in Egypt.

Sokhna, located about 40 kilometres south of Suez on the Red Sea, will be 43rd terminal of the DP World which has already been running port operations in 23 countries.

SHUAA Capital acquires 20% in Orion Overseas...

SHUAA Capital PSC is an investment bank, headquartered in Dubai that has accquired a 20% stake in Orion Holding Overseas SA, a financial services provider, for 193 mil United Arab Emirate dirhams ($ 52.566 mil USD).

Orion Overseas is involved in multi asset-class brokerage, quality asset management and corporate finance.

SHUAA's goal through the accquisition is to expand it's brokerage execution skills to eight markets from three and be the one stop shop in the region across multi-asset class.

Reverse Dollar Drain

During the recent market turmoil, SWFs provided $59 billion in much-needed liquidity to the Wall Street banks battered by more than $130 billion in writedowns from the declining values of mortgage-related assets.

While a significant share of this liquidity came from GCC based sovereign funds, economists said that the massive economic diversification and infrastructure development under way in the Gulf countries have substantially increased the chance of reverse investment flows.

In other words, the availability of future funds (for investment abroad) from the oil-exporting nations would increasingly depend on what share of oil revenue is taken for in their domestic economies.

Other factors also include the pressure on arab leaders to create job opportunities for citizens in the range of 4-6 million over the next 10 years .

Improving real estate locally is yet another arena into which many of the GCC states have have followed in Dubai's footsteps as viable opportunities notwithstanding the fact that they could potentially serve as alternate revenue sources in times to come.

Wall street may not feel necessarily feel the impact of this in the near term.But being bailed out each time by the Gulf Alliance may not be the best strategy . Then again , there's Singapore right?

Sky to Bridge Capital from the Gulf

New York based SkyBridge Capital, a hedge manager fund backed by Michael Dell is looking to raise $500 million towards launching a fund.They have approached Qatar Investment Authority and the Abudhabi Investment Authority.

Skybridge came into the news when providing hedge fund seed capital to talented managers without necessarily investing in their portfolio became the new fad.

Yet another company whose website has zilch info.Don't beleive me, check it out for yourself [link]

ACT airlines stake bought by Manara Investments

ACT airlines is an Istanbul based cargo carrier owned by Dallas-based HBK Investments and Turkish businessmen Yavuz Çizmeci and Cankut Bagana. Manara capital, which was founded in 2005 by a group of 4 Saudi businessmen has bought 21% equity stake in ACT for an undisclosed sum.

One thing I've noticed over the past few days while looking up capital firms in the region is that rarely do they have a web presence and if they do, it ends up being a poorly done site. Take the case of Manara. After several minutes of googling and stumbling on three companies with the same name, it turned out that none of them were remotely close to the saudi group.

Ofcourse we re not here to critique on site design (or lack of it)-but it does help getting to know an firm and the array of portfolio that it involves itselfs with.

Return of the Oryx

The Oryx as many of you already know( or don't) is an animal that was almost driven to extinction in the Arabian Peninsula (only to be re-introduced in the early 80s).

We 're talking here , however about the rebound Oryx Private Equity Fund, floated by National Commercial Bank Capital Company of Saudi that has acquired major stake in HBG - a private equity fund out of Dubai.

HBG has been involved with deals that focus on consumer logistics, financial services & infrastructure.

As per the terms of the deal, Oryx will act as anchor investor in HBG's $200 million private equity fund

The deal reinforces a growing trend of involvement by large scale financial institutions in Middle Eastern private equity either through wholly owned subsidiaries or in partnership with leading independent players.

HBG is expected to invest over $2 billion in course of the next investment period.