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Browsing: Fairfax Financial
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 …