After suffering heavy losses on its investment in Credit Suisse, Saudi National Bank, the bank’s largest shareholder until last month’s rescue, appointed a new chairman. The bank announced on Monday that CEO Saeed Mohammed Al Ghamdi will succeed Ammar Al Khudairy as chairman after the latter stepped down for personal reasons. A bourse statement confirmed that Talal Ahmed Al Khereiji, the company’s deputy CEO, would be taking over as acting CEO.
All new policies will be implemented as of this Monday, about two weeks after Al Khudairy announced that the largest bank in the kingdom by assets will not be purchasing additional shares in the Swiss financial institution for regulatory reasons. The comments were interpreted as a catalyst for additional selling of Credit Suisse shares and exacerbated a crisis of trust in the firm, which had already seen clients withdraw over $110 billion in the last three months of 2022. Credit Suisse lost a fifth of its value due to a combination of global banking industry concerns and Al Khudairy’s statements, leading to its ultimate purchase by domestic competitor UBS for $3.2bn.
After committing to an investment of over $26 billion on October 27, Saudi National Bank saw its market value drop by almost $24 billion when it purchased roughly 9.9 percent of Credit Suisse for 5.5 billion riyals ($1.46bn) in November. While it had a loss of over $1 billion as of last week, CEO John Thain assured investors on March 20 that the decline in the value of the company’s investments would neither slow the company’s expansion or reduce its profit margins. This month, Al Khudairy also stated that the bank was not considering any foreign acquisitions and was instead concentrating on expanding its presence in Saudi Arabia.
