Dubai : Arqaam Capital Ltd, a Dubai-based investment bank, wants to help other Indonesian lenders find investors in the Gulf region after advising PT Bank Kesawan on the sale of a stake in itself to Qatar National Bank SAQ.
"There is active interest from a number" of mid-tier Indonesian banks to do deals such as the Qatar National Bank investment, Tamer Nazih Makary, Arqaam's executive director, said in an interview yesterday.
About "four to five conventional banks, and two to three Islamic banks" may be looking to sell stakes to help raise money for growth, he said.
QNB holding
Qatar National Bank took a 70 per cent holding in Indonesia's PT Bank Kesawan after becoming the standby buyer in its rights offer in January. Indonesia has more than 100 banks and the country's central bank has prodded them to combine and boost capital after it spent 450 trillion rupiah ($37 billion) on bailouts following the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.
Al Baraka Banking Group, Bahrain's biggest publicly traded Islamic lender, was also interested in acquiring a stake in PT Bank Kesawan, abandoning the plan amid the financial crisis, according to an official at Indonesia's central bank.
Other Gulf banks that own shares in Indonesian lenders are Jeddah, Saudi Arabia-based Islamic Development and Kuwait's Boubyan Bank KSC, which is partially owned by PT Bank Muamalat Indonesia.
