The Excellence Investments group made two important announcements today regard its cooperation with foreign investment houses.
Excellence Investments first announced it was negotiating to buy Rothschild Asset Management’s (RAM) 25% stake in Excellence Zmiha Securities and Investments, which manages the asset portfolios of the Excellence Investment’s customers, provident funds, mutual funds, etc.
In 2001, Excellence Investments signed an agreement with RAM, which manages assets for the Rothschild group. RAM paid $3.25 million for 25% of Excellence Zmiha.
Excellence Investments said the spur for the negotiations to acquire RAM’s share of Excellence Zmiha was the Rothschild group’s decision to abandon asset management, which meant that the latter could no longer function ass a strategic partner for Excellence Investments.
Excellence Investments also announced it had signed a strategic cooperation agreement with another investment house Bear Stearns International. Cooperation will include investments in bonds, structured products (in which Excellence has stood out over the past year, with its issues), and investments in hedge, foreign currency, and other funds.
Excellence Investments co-owner and chairman Roni Biram said that strategic cooperation with Bear Stearns would expand the basket of financial products that his firm provided to the Israeli capital market. He added that most of the structured bonds issued by Excellence Investments over the past year had resulted from cooperation with Bear Stearns.
The public tender for the Bashan bonds, the most recent Excellence Investment issue, is taking place today. The Bashan, a 12-year dollar bond, includes a knockout mechanism, which stipulates that the bonds will be automatically redeemed when the accumulated interest amounts to 15% of the principal. Interest in the first year is 11.25%, regardless of the LIBOR, and afterwards 10% nominal interest, minus double the six-month LIBOR.
Excellence Investment recently completed its merger with Nessuah Zannex, which it acquired a few months ago.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on September 18, 2003