Kuwait has recently changed its decision to sell off its shares in the Jordan-based Arab Bank, thus suspending plans by Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, another shareholder, to purchase 62.5 percent of the Kuwaiti holdings, reported the Jordan Times newspaper on Sunday.
Sabeeh Masri, a leading shareholder in the Arab Bank, said on Saturday that Hariri had initially planned to buy all of Kuwait's four percent share in the bank, or 400,000 shares.
But Masri said a senior “Jordanian official” had convinced Hariri to purchase only 250,000 shares from the Kuwaiti government, and to leave the remaining 150,000 shares for the Social Security Corporation, which, he said, had expressed its intention to buy some of the Kuwaiti shares, said the paper.
“At first, the Kuwaiti government agreed to this [split] deal,” Masri told the paper.
“But all of a sudden they [the Kuwaitis] changed their mind. We do not know what is going to happen next, whether they will again offer to sell or not,” he said.
“Hariri had submitted a good offer to the Kuwaitis, but I do not know whether they are looking for better offers,” he added.
Hariri is currently one of the leading shareholders in the Arab Bank, with a 12 percent holding.
The controlling shareholder, at 17 percent, is Arab Bank chairman of the board Abdul Majeed Shoman.
The Kuwaiti and Saudi governments are also major shareholders, with a combined ownership of eight percent.
Shoman said on Saturday that he was “ready to buy the shares of any party willing to sell.”
He told the paper that that he had been informed by a representative of the Kuwaiti government, who was in Amman last week to attend a meeting of the bank's board, that Kuwait was no longer in the market to liquidate its holdings.
Set up in Palestine in 1930 during the British mandate, the Arab Bank is considered among the best commercial banks in the Middle East with assets amounting to $21.3 billion in 2000, up from $19.7 billion in 1999.
In 2000, the bank's deposits rose 10 percent, or $14.9 billion from $13.4 billion the previous year – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
