Algosaibi said to owe $9.2 billion

Bloomberg

The Algosaibi group held a meeting with creditors in Bahrain June 24 to ask for a grace period of 90 days to investigate the debt, said one person involved in the talks, who declined to be identified.

The size of Algosaibi’s liabilities "strikes the markets as a surprise," said Luis Costa, an emerging-markets debt strategist at Commerzbank in London. "This is a problem when it comes to buying anything originated from the Middle East, how to properly measure the leverage of players there."

Algosaibi said June 11 it had discovered "substantial irregularities" within its financial services arm after The International Banking Corporation BSC in Bahrain defaulted on debt. An Algosaibi spokesman said last month that Maan al-Sanea, the Saudi billionaire who owns a stake in HSBC Holdings, managed TIBC. A spokesman for Saad Group, al-Sanea’s holding company, denied he had a management role at the bank.

The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency on May 28 froze the accounts of al-Sanea, according to a person who read the central bank’s circular.