Thursday, June 28, 2012 -
Halyk Bank, Kazakhstan’s second biggest lender by assets, said Thursday it will spend around $195 million to buy back its preferred shares from the state.
The bank told the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange it will pay 28.8 billion tenge to Kazakh national welfare fund Samruk-Kazyna for 160 million shares at 179.94 tenge each.
The share buyback will take place Friday.
“Purchase and sale deals will be made and registered exclusively with preference shares on 29 June 2012,” it added said in a press release published in the state-run Kazakhstanskaya Pravda daily.
The Almaty-headquartered lender had earlier posted strong year-on-year results during the first quarter of 2012. Net profit leapt 58 percent to $114 million in the January-March 2012 period. Its bad debt charges dropped by over one-third at the same time.
Samruk-Kazyna bought 50.3 percent of Halyk’s preferred shares in April 2009 for $223 million after the global financial crisis ravaged credit markets.
Halyk is majority owned by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s daughter Dinara Nazarbayeva and her husband.