Investcorp sets out succession plan as chief Kirdar to retire

Nemir Kirdar, the founding chief executive of Investcorp, is to retire after more than three decades at the Bahrain-based investment bank.

Iraq-born Mr Kirdar, who is in his late 70s, will retire on June 30 next year, to be replaced by a three-pronged management team.

Mohammed al-Ardhi, an existing non-executive board member, will take over as executive chairman at the bank, which has $11bn of assets under management. Mohammed al-Shroogi, president of Investcorp's Gulf business, and Rishi Kapoor, chief financial officer, will become co-chief executives.

The succession-planning announcement brings to an end a period of uncertainty about when Mr Kirdar, the driving force behind Investcorp, would step down.

In the Gulf states, many large companies - reflecting the monarchies in which they operate - are dealing with succession planning issues as ageing founder -shareholders manage their retirement and hand power to a new generation of executives.

Mr Kirdar, whose family of Turkish origin hails from the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, said he was leaving Investcorp satisfied that it was "now firmly established as a global financial institution".

He will stay on until the end of the bank's financial year to hand over the private-equity focused business to his successors.

Harvard-graduate Mr Ardhi, a former head of Oman's air force and chairman of Oman National Bank, will lead Investcorp's strategy and act as an ambassador among clients in the Gulf, as well as representing the bank in the west, its primary destination for corporate acquisitions.

Messrs Shroogi and Kapoor will be responsible for day-to-day management.

Mr Kirdar left Chase Manhattan, where he had been tasked with setting up a regional banking operation from Abu Dhabi, to help found Investcorp in 1982 by raising capital from prominent families across the oil-rich Gulf states.

Under Mr Kirdar's leadership, the bank competed with western institutions as he sought to channel Gulf capital into US and European markets.

In recent years, the bank has also invested in its home region, but it has avoided entering other emerging markets, such as Asia and Africa.

Investcorp became known for investing in luxury brands, such as Gucci and Tiffany, turning them into multi-billion-dollar brands.

While it bought Danish luxury retailer Georg Jensen in 2012, the bank lost out to Blackstone, the US buyout fund, when bidding for a 20 per cent stake in Italian fashion group Versace earlier this year.

© The Financial Times Limited 2014. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation