Kathmandu. Egypt has raised more than 36.3 billion Egyptian pounds by selling 45 percent of Bank of Cairo’s shares through an initial public offering (IPO). The money is the largest public issue ever in the history of the Egyptian exchange, the government said.
According to government data, more than 6.86 billion units of shares were sold under the IPO. After this transaction, the total valuation of the bank has reached about 80.80 billion Egyptian pounds. The amount raised is equivalent to about 650.7 million in US dollars.
Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly attended the opening ceremony. The event held at the Egyptian Exchange in Cairo was also attended by top officials from the banking and capital markets sectors.
Prime Minister Madbouly described the listing of the bank’s shares as an important achievement of Egypt’s economic reform programme. He said it reflected the government’s “state ownership policy” aimed at expanding private sector participation in the economy and increasing share ownership among individual and institutional investors.
Omar Radwan, president of the Egyptian Exchange, said the stock issuance marked the beginning of a new chapter in the country’s capital markets. The Egyptian government has taken the IPO of the Bank of Cairo as an important step in its policy to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and further expand the capital market.
