This year's news for Egypt's capital markets has not been uniformly bleak. Internationally, for example, the one significant equity issue to have come out of Egypt in recent months was - given its timing - a colossal success. This was the $57 million sale of GDRs in Egypt's leading investment-banking group, EFG-Hermes, on which Merrill Lynch acted as the global coordinator in July. Priced at the centre of its originally indicated range of between $10.60 and $12.50, this was more than five times oversubscribed, attracting total demand of more than $300 million from a wide range of institutional accounts in the US, Europe and the Middle East.
A satisfactory enough outcome at any time, this was an especially pleasing given its launch into an international market deeply twitchy about anything with emerging-market connotations. "I think there were two reasons for the issue being so well subscribed," says David Hatt, director of equity capital markets at Merrill Lynch in London. "First, because EFG-Hermes is an extraordinarily well managed company in a sector which investors understand, which is run by a group of people who are very well known across the international financial community.