The purpose of this venture is not just to be another financial services company in the lexicon of initialled businesses but rather their ambitions are quite literally to become the outright leading emerging markets asset management firm. This is a tall order but given some of the names involved in the company, they deserve credibility. The name of the firm is Algebra Capital (www.algebra-capital.com) and it is the first 100 per cent management owned company to be granted a license by the stringent Dubai International Financial Centre. Licences have, up to this point, only been awarded to subsidiaries of large banks or well-established existing global firms. If this doesn’t hint at the quality and contacts that the experts at the company have, we don’t know what does.
It is the belief of the founding members that neither capital nor investment opportunities are lacking in our region rather what is lacking is the availability of talent with the necessary track record, staying power and vision to take advantage of these opportunities. So who is this company made up of? For a start the ceo is Ziad Makkawi, who has become a well known quantity in his 20 years of experience. He started at JP Morgan in New York, he then moved to Elf Aquitaine in Geneva before settling in the region and co-founding both Lebanon Invest and the Middle East Capital Group (MECG). He then built from scratch and ran the financial services business at SHUAA Capital. Finally and most recently he served as ceo at Dubai Bank.
Other team members include Joe Kawkabani and Mohieddine Kronfol who bring a combined 17 years of added experience. Kawkabani had been responsible for managing over 1 billion USD in regional equities for SHUAA Capital whilst running the Equity Asset Management division. Kronfol had been head of SHUAA Capital’s Capital Markets department as well as the Fund Manager of The Arab Income Fund which traded emerging market and exotic debts well as local and foreign currency debt in the MENA region. The two of them will continue in their specialized domains at Algebra.
Also stepping up to the fray are former head of Deutsche Bank’s asset management for the Middle East, Daniel Smaller, will head up the sales and distribution function. Commanding the Legal and Compliance department is Jacques Visser, formerly head of the treasury legal team for Nedbank in Johannesburg, South Africa and most recently the General Counsel at Dubai Bank where his range of product structuring was infinite including documentation conversion of Dubai Bank to Shariah compliancy.
Algebra Capital will manage assets in private and public markets across all asset classes focusing on the Middle East and North Africa markets to begin with. Its services will be packaged as fund solutions, discretionary mandates or structured products. A MENA-listed equities fund will be the first such product to be launched around April this year.
Also on the cards are private equity funds focusing on the financial services, healthcare, real estate and energy sectors of the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, expect debt funds that invest in emerging market local currency bonds and global sukuks. Moreover, seeing that it only took the company six months to set up, it looks like Algebra Capital’s ambition of expanding into Asia may just happen at the blink of an eye. You read it here first!
