Qatar National Bank acquires $200 million stake in Ecobank

Pan-African lender, Ecobank Transnational Incorporated (ETI), announced Thursday that Qatar National Bank (QNB) has acquired a 12.5 percent stake in it from Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON).

The stake, worth $200 million of Ecobank shares were transferred to the Gulf’s largest bank on Thursday at 20.01 naira each.

AMCON acquired the stake after Ecobank merged its Nigerian operations with failed lender Oceanic Bank, which AMCON helped to recapitalise, before the Ecobank takeover.

With the sale, AMCON, the second-largest shareholder in Ecobank, has divested its stake.

The transaction would make QNB the

second-largest shareholder in Ecobank after South Africa’s state-owned Public Investment Corporation Ltd, according to Thomson Reuters data.

QNB has said it wants to become the largest bank in the Middle East and Africa by 2017 – it is currently second in terms of assets, behind South Africa’s Standard Bank.

The bank’s chief financial officer, Ramzi Mari, told Reuters in February it was looking for acquisition targets in Turkey, Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa to help achieve that goal.

It is the second acquisition which the Qatari lender has made in the last two years in Africa: in March 2013, it completed the purchase of Societe Generale’s Egyptian business for $2 billion.

For Lagos-listed Ecobank, the new cash will help to boost its capital reserves at a time when lenders in Africa’s biggest economy are enhancing levels to adapt to new international capital requirements.

Ecobank expects its capital adequacy ratio to hit 18.7 percent of assets by year-end, after all the debt conversions to equity, up from 17.5 percent in the first six months of the year, CEO Albert Essien said. The minimum capital adequacy ratio in Nigeria is 16 percent.

BusinessDay