Dubai: National Bank of Kuwait (NBK), the Gulf Arab state’s largest commercial lender, said on Tuesday it had been invited by the public debt office at the Kuwaiti ministry of finance to participate in a bond issue by the government.
A request for proposals has been sent to NBK’s subsidiary NBK Capital to help arrange a sovereign US dollar-denominated bond issue, and the deadline to respond is January 5, the bank said in a bourse statement.
The request is under study, the statement added. Finance Minister Anas Al Saleh said in July that the government planned to sell as much as $10 billion of US dollar-denominated conventional and Islamic bonds in international markets to help plug its budget deficit for the current fiscal year, which will end on March 31.
