Rodrigo Orihuela and Anatoly Kurmanaev Madrid and Caracas
EX-BARCLAYS chief executive Robert Diamond has a rival: Spanish billionaire Alberto Cortina, who is building a banking presence in West Africa to take advantage of demand from sovereign and corporate clients.
Cortina was conducting due diligence on a retail bank in Senegal after his Banque de Dakar investment bank started operations in the West African nation this month, he said in Madrid. He’s also planning to set up an investment banking unit in Ivory Coast to the east by the end of the year.
Africa is attracting investor interest as growth outstrips that of many developed countries. Diamond and Ugandan entrepreneur Ashish Thakkar set up Atlas Mara to acquire African financial service companies and is in talks to invest in Banque Populaire du Rwanda.
David Bonderman’s TPG Capital is also looking at deals, and said last week it partnered with billionaire philanthropist Mo Ibrahim’s Satya Capital to invest in African healthcare, consumer and financial services.
Cortina and a group of partners, which he declined to name, planned to operate in the West African Economic and Monetary Union region. The region contained relative political stability and a common currency, the West African CFA franc, backed by the French central bank, he said.
Special call
Through the investment bank, the company aimed to act as an adviser on corporate deals as well as sovereign and company issuances and private banking, said Cortina, speaking alongside Vasco Duarte-Silva, a former banker at Citigroup and Banco Santander who is leading the BDK Group in Senegal.
Cortina says he felt the “special call of Africa” when visiting for the first time in the early 70s. While he made his wealth in construction more than four decades ago, he has a wide range of investments, from oil to dairy products, including a dairy venture in Nigeria. He also owned a farm in Kenya for several years and was married to a heiress in the 70s.
Diamond quit as Barclays chief executive in July 2012 after the London-based bank was fined for manipulating benchmark interest rates. – Bloomberg