European Banks Say They Have Minimal Egypt Exposure

[Joanne98]

Source: WSJ

LONDON (Dow Jones)--Several major European banks Friday said they have little financial exposure to Egypt as growing anti-government protests in the country continued to threaten the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

Two U.K.-based banking giants, HSBC Holdings PLC (HBC) and Standard Chartered PLC (STAN.LN), are seen as the most globally exposed among banks, with a strong focus on emerging markets.

But HSBC said it has a "fairly small" business in Egypt, with around 75-79 offices, which includes bank branches. Its half-year results last year showed that the Egypt operations had pretax profit of $78 million, or under a quarter of the Middle East pretax profit of $346 million, which in turn is just 3.1% of group pretax profit.

An HSBC spokesman declined to comment on how the political situation could affect the bank's business in the country.



Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110128-707610.html

[ret5hd]

1. Ha! So now "money" (as a power/entity, not as a method of exchange )...

is starting to abandon the egyptian regime! "We got no skin in this game!"

[Demeter]

2. Well, that's okay then...Carry On!

At least we know now that the Marines will NOT be called out to save the banksters' asse(t)s, as usual..