Saturday, Jun 02, 2012

(This story was originally published Thursday.)

CAIRO (Zawya Dow Jones)--Casting doubts over its planned joint venture with Qatar's QInvest, Egypt's biggest bank EFG Hermes (HRHO.CI) said it received a takeover offer Wednesday from a consortium of Arab investors called Planet IB Ltd.

The bank, in a filing to the Egyptian stock exchange Thursday, confirmed local newspaper reports that Planet had approached the bank with a buy-out offer.

EFG Hermes said it received a letter from Planet expressing its intention to apply to buy all of EFG Hermes shares, but "the letter did not contain any detail about the acquirers or the proposed price or any clarifying details," according to the filing.

An executive at the bank told Zawya Dow Jones that the offer doesn't affect the banks's deal with QInvest. "The deal with QInvest is in the making and there are no changes otherwise. This does not affect the deal with QInvest," said May El Gammal, the marketing manager at EFG Hermes.

She added that the offer came in late Wednesday night and the bank was trying to know more about the offer.

However, an analyst at an Egyptian brokerage who didn't want to be named, said if they accepted Planet's offer they would have to cancel the deal with QInvest. "If the price from Planet is better, they'll go ahead with it," he said. "And if this happens they definitely have to cancel the deal with QInvest."

QInvest wasn't immediately available for comment.

EFG Hermes and QInvest said earlier this month they have reached agreement on the creation of a joint investment bank with operations across the Middle East, Africa, Turkey and Asia.

The joint bank includes EFG Hermes' brokerage, research, asset management, investment banking and infrastructure fund operations.

Meanwhile, EFG Hermes' statement Thursday added that Planet was established specifically to acquire EFG Hermes and is made up of a group of Arab investors and Egyptian bankers, who weren't named.

Also on Wednesday, the co-chief executives of EFG Hermes were accused along with the sons of former President Hosni Mubarak and five others of breaching stock market regulations by buying a controlling stake in Al Watany Bank of Egypt and then selling it without ever declaring their ownership.

-By Farah Halime; Contributing to Dow Jones Newswires; +20111 4994453

Fhalime@gmail.com

Copyright (c) 2012 Dow Jones & Co.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

02-06-12 0650GMT