Browsing: Atlas Mara

Billed as Africa’s largest financial institution in the mid-2010s, the story of Atlas Mara is as intriguing as the money it was said to control at that time.

Sometime in 2016, the financial institution wanted to buy Barclays Bank’s Africa’s assets, adding to the lustre the company had at the time. Established just three years earlier in 2013, Atlas Mara struggled to establish itself as a major player in Sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) financial sector.

The company was founded by the then-proclaimed Ugandan billionaire Ashish Thakkar but four years later, he left the entity after a divorce case which exposed that he used to buff his net worth. In the October 2016 court proceedings in London, Thakkar said he was worth only about US$540,000 claiming that he owned nothing in the Mara Group.

This pronouncement, unbeknown to him, made investors in the firm jittery which led the company on a downward …

Equity Group Holding announced it had entered into an agreement with the Commercial bank of the Congo Banque commercial du Congo by assets.

The regional lender aims at merging its business with that of the existing Congolese subsidiary. It is on course to establish a presence in ten African countries with a cautious entry into Zimbabwe which is currently weighed down by a volatile exchange rate and hyperinflation.

The takeover of the Zimbabwean lender BancABC (Zimbabwe) which serves both corporates and retail was part of Equity’s grand Atlas Mara deal. With the deal, Equity gains entry into two additional countries Zambia and Mozambique through acquisitions.

BancABC is officially known as ABC Holdings and is a fully owned subsidiary of Atlas Mara which acquired the bank in 2014 for an estimated $265 million. It has subsidiaries in Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

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Equity Bank has posted a 5.1 per cent rise in its profit for the first quarter of the year as the SMEs —focused—lender continues to navigate the interest rate cap regime in Kenya and a loan default trend in Tanzania.

The Nairobi Security Exchange (NSE) listed bank recorded a Ksh6.2 billion (USD61.3 million) net profit for the period, up from Ksh5.9 billion (USD58.4 million) in a similar period last year, buoyed by interest income and cost management.

READ:Equity net profit grows to Ksh19.8 billion on FinTech

Interest income from loans and advances rose to Ksh9.1 billion (USD 90million) up from Ksh8.7 billion(USD86 million) last year as the lender’s loan book swelled to Ksh305.5 billion (USD3.02 billion ) compared to Ksh271.1 billion (USD2.7 billion ) in March last year.

Interest earned from government securities equally went up to close the quarter at Ksh4.1 billion (USD40.5 million), compared to Ksh3.7 billion …