OCI closes US$950mn club deal

Orascom Construction Industries (OCI), the biggest publicly traded builder in Egypt, has secured a US$950mn loan facility to partially repay the debt on its acquisition of Egyptian Fertilizer Company (EFC).

The transaction is a club deal involving Piraeus Bank, Bank of Alexandria, HSBC, National Société Générale Bank, Arab Bank, Arab African International Bank, BNP Paribas, Samba, National Bank of Abu Dhabi and APICORP as mandated lead arrangers.

National Société Générale Bank was facility agent on the deal with Arab bank acting as the global co-ordinator.

The facility carries a tenor of five years, is structured as a bullet repayment and is priced at Libor +100 basis points. OCI will take on the facility at the holding company level.

OCI was established in 1976 and is now is a leading contractor active in emerging markets. It  provides engineering procurement and construction services on major industrial, commercial, water/sewage, transportation, telecommunications, maritime, tourism and railway projects, both for private and public customers and principally located in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

OCI signed an agreement in February with UAE-based Abraaj Capital ("Abraaj"), which agreed to merge its fertilizer production operations under OCI for a combined cash and shares equity consideration of approximately US$1.59bn.

The contractor also announced this week that it intends to spend US$800mn to build phosphate-based fertilizer plants in the Middle East and North Africa in early 2009.