Recently, Occidental Petroleum Corp. (OXY) entered into a partnership to develop oil and natural gas fields in Bahrain. Occidental along with partners Mubadala Development Company (Mubadala) and the National Oil and Gas Authority of Bahrain (NOGA) formed a new joint operating company, Tatweer Petroleum-Bahrain Field Development Company, which will serve as the operator for the Bahrain field.   The company will operate under the Development and Production Sharing Agreement signed in April 2009 by all three partners, approved by the parliament of Bahrain in May 2009 and ratified by His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Kalifa. Tatweer Petroleum will begin start operations in the Bahrain field immediately. The operating team would include individuals from the Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco), Occidental and Mubadala employees and few local employees.   Oil and natural gas production from the Bahrain field is expected to peak at 100,000 barrels per day and ...

PennyOmega.com Short Highlights Before the Bell!

PennyOmega.com Short Highlights Before The Bell!

PennyOmega.com Stocks Upgraded, Downgraded and Short Highlights Before the Bell Monday August 24, 2009

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Industrial Nanotech, Inc. (Pink Sheets:INTK), an emerging global leader in nanoscience solutions, today announced that the Company’s sales are growing rapidly in the Middle East through their established distributor, Nanofan Industrial Coatings, Ltd., in the UAE., Bahrain, Oman and Qatar, and the company’s new distributor, Saudi Environmental Projects Ltd., in Saudi Arabia.

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) will host webcasts in a two part series with senior executives the week of August 24th, 2009 after the close of the market. Cisco will be discussing our Service Provider

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PennyOmega.com Stock Report!

PennyOmega.com Hot Stock News & Alerts!

 

Tuesday August 18, 2009

PennyOmega.com Stock Report!

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Lazard Ltd (NYSE:LAZ) announced today that Tom Tuft, one of the leading bankers in equity capital markets, will join Lazard as Chairman, Global Capital Markets Advisory, and a Vice Chairman, US Investment Banking in November. Mr. Tuft, based in New York, will join Lazard from Goldman Sachs & Co., where he most recently served as Chairman of its Equity Capital Markets group.

UDR, Inc. (NYSE: UDR), a leading multifamily real estate investment trust (REIT), today announced that it has extended the early tender deadline in respect of its previously announced cash tender offer and consent solicitation (the “Offer”) for its

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Interesting comment by S&P Fund Services lead analyst Alison Cratchley, made to Business Intelligence Middle-East, on the possibility of an impending correction across MENA markets:

“Relative to other emerging markets, the MENA region significantly underperformed (12.7% rise compared with 37.8%) in the six months to the end of June 2009. This probably reflects investors’ perception that the MENA region is highly leveraged to a U.S. recovery due to its dependence on oil revenues, whereas other emerging markets are supported by robust domestic demand.”

Several fund managers quoted, including Shakeel Sarwar, Head of Asset Management at the Manama (Bahrain)-based SICO, an investment bank, as well as Mashreq Bank’s Ibrahim Masood, concurred with this cautious sentiment, citing the region’s potentially unsustainable rally to date, low liquidity

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A Dow Jones report published last week quoted Standard & Poor’s Financial Services as theorizing that the $700 billion global Islamic finance industry would “weather the financial crisis” and moreover would resume its growth on the support of “high demand for Shariah-compliant products, which are considered less risky than convention debt.”  While the global issuance of sukuk fell 35% to $5.3 billion in Q2 compared with last year, a 164% surge in volume in this year’s second quarter compared to the first signaled renewed and robust interest, according to analysts.  In fact, Standard Chartered Bank’s CEO of Islamic banking predicts a primary market of “close to $10 billion” by year’s end.  The biggest sukuk issuers YTD have been Malaysia and Indonesia, followed by Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the largest Middle East economy.

Facilitating sukuk’s global growth will be certain legal changes (i.e., tax system overhauls) currently

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An interesting feature in this week’s Economist (“Face Value: Godly but ambitious”) focuses on Adnan Yousif (pictured right), who in 1980 with the Bahrain-based Arab Banking Corporation was one of the first to establish an Islamic-finance practice and is now the chairman of the Union of Arab Banks and chief executive of Al Baraka Banking Group. At the time, a glut of petrodollars in the Gulf was largely invested in bonds [namely American] whose yield was verboten under sharia. Twenty years later, “there were more than 200 Islamic banks and Mr. Yousif was leading from the front.” That said, what the industry lacked, and still lacks today, Yousif argues, is a veritable, global Islamic bank. “Today $700 billion of global assets are said to comply with sharia law. Even so, traditional finance houses rather than Islamic

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According to Mohieddine Kronfol (pictured left), managing director of Algebra Capital, a Dubai-based investment firm, pricing of Bahrain’s $750m, five-year sovereign sukuk (Islamic bond) issue–which is being managed by Calyon S.A., Deutsche Bank and HSBC and is expected to yield somewhere 340-350 basis points above similar maturity U.S. Treasuries–is on the “low end of expectations” and will thus limit liquidity. Abu Dhabi’s conventional April issuance yielded 400 points, for instance. “It would have been better had they left some juice in there to attract a wider audience,” he said, adding that more generous pricing would have helped to ensure secondary trading and liquidity “for the long-term interest of the region.” Yet critique of the pricing aside, Kronfol did admit that “the issue would be a success regardless the pricing, as Islamic banks in the region have enough liquidity

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Jobs Jamboree gets a lift…  The real numbers…  The dollar comes back with vengeance!  RBNZ to meet this week… And Now… Today’s Pfennig!

Good day… And a Marvelous Monday to you! You know the Jobs Jamboree data that printed on Friday, and created some HUGE euphoria among the media types that love to just “read the news” and not actually do the research to report it? Yes… It was a very good number, on the outside… Not that losing 345,000 jobs in a month is a good thing, but it is far better than the near 700,000 jobs lost a couple of months ago.

So… I’ve got that to talk about today… And the rebound by the dollar that has taken the euro to the 1.38 handle and looking as if it is going to go lower… And, then finally, I have to get on my soapbox again, because I don’t think I want my

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Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation (...

International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC), an Abu Dhabi-based investment company, announced on Monday that it has been assigned Aa2/AA/AA long term credit ratings by Moody’s, Fitch Ratings and Standard and Poor’s, with a stable outlook.  “While we have no immediate plans to raise external capital, the ratings will facilitate future engagement with the debt capital markets if IPIC wishes to pursue this,” commented its managing director, Khadem al-Qubaisi, who added that the ratings were a means of “reinforcing strong corporate governance principles and enhancing transparency.”  According to one analyst, the ratings are “a signal that [state sovereign] funds are eager to keep spending and [are] willing to borrow to increase their buying power.”

IPIC’s ratings acquisition comes on the heels of a similar move by another Abu Dhabi investment arm, Mubadala Development Corp, which issued its first annual report last week and also recently announced plans to set up

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