Beirut’s budding investment banking landscape is in process of new diversification as Byblos Investment Bank is embellishing its ranks while other banks are reported to be looking newly into this area of activity.
The movements in the community of specialized bankers are loosely related to changes triggered by last year’s merger and acquisition operation between Bank Audi Group and Banque Saradar. While the merging banks at the time had indicated that they would aim to avoid staff redundancies, banking analysts suggested that the investment banking operations of both sides would be likely to have some overlap, since three entities would have to be consolidated – Audi Investment Bank, Lebanon Invest, and Saradar Investment House (SIH).
The re-structuring of the Audi Saradar Group’s investment banking operations led to the formation of Audi Saradar Investment Bank under chairmanship of Lebanon Invest founder, Marwan Ghandour, and with Ramzi Saliba as general manager. Four bankers of the old SIH team, who had initially stayed on with the Audi Saradar Group, felt that they could find more room to deploy their talents if they would leave Audi Saradar and thus recently parted from the group on reportedly very amicable terms with a golden handshake and with plans, according to finance insiders, to set up their own investment funds.
The setting free of investment banking talent caught the attention of at least one bank interested in creating an investment banking subsidiary and was also welcome news at Bank Byblos Group which jumped at the opportunity to upsize the team of one-year old Byblos Invest Bank. Byblos convinced three of the migratory investment bankers to choose BIB and on July 1 appointed former SIH head Joe Issa-El-Khoury to the position of general manager at Byblos Invest Bank.
According to Bank Byblos Group’s vice chairman, Semaan Bassil, BIB is poised to develop investment banking activities out of Lebanon for Sudan, Algeria and Syria where the group is presently active, and for Abu Dhabi where a new operation of the group is to be established soon. “The group believes that the excess liquidity available in the Arab world will be seeking investment venues and we aim to play, through BIB, a leading role in channeling those funds into rewarding investments,” Bassil told Executive.
