Finance
Middle East Banks Are Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game
- Four Gulf banks financed $3.25 billion loan to GEMS Education
- Loan is part of deal that saw Brookfield buy a stake, CVC exit
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When one of the largest private school operators on the planet was looking to pull off a deal involving buyout titans Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. and CVC Capital Partners, it wasn’t the usual coterie of Wall Street banks that stepped in to help.
Instead, it was four Emirati banks that financed a 10-year $3.25 billion loan to GEMS Education. The loan was part of a roughly $5.2 billion deal that involved a Brookfield-led consortium injecting almost $2 billion of equity to acquire a stake in the education giant, and allowed CVC to largely exit the company.