emeafinance Magazine - April / May 2008

Lado Gurgenidze's never-ending roadshow

It caused a certain amount of surprise in financial circles when Lado Gurgenidze was made prime minister of Georgia in November 2007. Julian Evans caught up with him recently in Tallinn, Estonia.

Lado Gurgenidze is a well-known figure in east European finance – a former head of CIS corporate finance at ABN Amro, who then re-located from London to Tbilisi in 2004 to become CEO of the Bank of Georgia, which he turned into the country’s leading private bank and the only Georgian company to list on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). The company is the pride of Georgia, having attracted over 200 institutional investors, and appreciated over 1,000% since flotation.

Dmitri Medvedev's to-do list

Dmitri Medvedev once told emeafinance's editor he didn't see anything particularly urgent to do if he became president of Russia. Now he is president, we ask what are the top ten issues that urgently require his attention.

I first saw Dmitri Medvedev speak at the World Editors Forum in Moscow in 2006. He had recently been made deputy prime minister, and was obviously being groomed as a possible successor to President Putin.

Egypt's unstable growth

As Egypt's government faces food riots and discontent on the street, foreign investors keep on coming.

April 6 should have been a crowning moment for the Egyptian government and the economic reform package it launched shortly after taking office in 2004. But on the same day that Egypt’s tough-minded investment minister, Mahmoud Mohieldin, announced that the Egyptian economy had attracted a record US$11.1bn-worth of foreign direct investment (FDI) during the fiscal year 2006-07, a wave of discontent swept through the country in response to rising food prices, stagnant wages, and high unemployment.

emeafinance 2008 awards

emeafinance's 2008 awards sought to recognise the best banks, teams, and deals in the EMEA region in 2007. The winners are:

Hungary's government hangs on

Despite the collapse of the ruling coalition, investors are hopeful the Hungarian government can stick to its fiscal austerity plans and weather the global credit crunch, writes Kester Eddy in Budapest.

The right-wing opposition and its supporting media in Hungary love the word ‘crisis’; they have been using, or misusing it for years in their regular analysis of the government’s performance, highlighting, for example, economic growth of just 1.3% last year, the lowest for over a decade and inflation pushing towards 7%.

A pioneer with perspective

Herbert Stepic, Deputy Chairman of Vienna-based Raiffeisen Zentralbank Osterreich (RZB) and CEO of Raiffeisen International, is widely regarded across the European banking industry as the chief architect of RZB’s aggressive expansion in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. He speaks with Christopher Moore, emeafinance’s publisher, about his 30 plus year international career at the bank.

It takes a lot of energy and enthusiasm to be on the road six months a year and to simultaneously manage a bank that employs 58,365 and has over the past six years raised its profit before tax from €175mn to €1.238bn. But energy and enthusiasm, not to mention a jovial, down to earth, and affable personality are qualities that Herbert Stepic, CEO of Raiffeisen International Bank and deputy chairman of RZB, has in abundance. 

Mozambique stands up in the starting blocks

Mozambique is creeping back onto investors’ radar scanners, as commercial financing trickles grow steadier, writes Kevin Godier.

Mozambique has been slowly pulling in the new investment that is required as a cornerstone of President Armando Guebuza’s economic programme. In what remains one of Africa’s poorest economies, where donors provided US$1.2bn-worth of support in 2007, capital market activity is highly embryonic, and the local banking sector remains constrained by a low capital base, but Mozambique’s infrastructure sector has acted as a draw for some significant streams of external commercial money.

Is Libya really open for business?

For decades Libya was a ‘pariah’ state, shunned by the international community. In 2004 the doors were flung open and foreign investors were enticed in, promises were made, contracts signed, hopes raised. Four years on however it appears that inertia and backtracking by the Gaddafi administration has set in. Was it all too good to be true after all, asks Nicholas Noe.

For some observers, 2007 seemed to offer proof that Libya had indeed finally turned a corner to embrace foreign direct investment and economic openness as its primary, inextricably linked national goals.