The first goal that you aimed at when launching the first Islamic Stock Exchange in 1994 was to encourage savings, and to increase investments awareness among people and companies in general. How successful do you think it has proved so far?
The investment environment is fine and it will enhance other countries especially Arabic ones, but of course we have a lot of work to do; starting with funds. When you look at the number of listed companies with which we started in 1995 up to 2000, we have made significant progress: we started with only 34 companies and we now have 44 - without mentioning the number of shares excluding the funds.
What is the structure of the Stock Exchange, what is the role of the government? Who finances it?
So far, the government has a certain commission that deals with us. Of course this is not healthy because we can be affected by the government policy in someway. We have a new law that creates a sort of shared commission on the top, and then under that comes the stock exchange security in Khartoum stock exchange. From there, we can develop other markets. At the moment there is no authority that can license the establishment of other stock exchange in the South. But now we feel confident that the experiment is working, in spite of the limitations of the system such as the lack of transparency. In spite of that, the market capitalization has gone from 44 million dollars in 1995 to about 400 million dollars today. Coming back to the new law, we feel that we can gradually improve our performance. Still it'll take some time, because you know we are suffering from the laws that were left to us by the British colonialists. We are still working with the 1925 company law. The British law helped us to stabilize the economy, but we really have to change it, and we have to do that gradually.
It is true that any institution that relies financially from the government is limited in some way as far as its autonomy is concerned. What is your plan to move towards a more private oriented economy?
We know once we take the government off, the stock exchange will have to be run by the companies listed in that stock exchange, they can take full responsibility on it. When they know that they can run their business by themselves, they can have their own management etc, and so on. I believe things would be different. We are now encouraging family companies to join the stock market.
Family businesses are very powerful in the Sudan. Are they already conscious of the benefits of opening their capital?
Yes, and you'll not believe it. Some of the private family companies have the same characteristic than the Japanese companies. Some people have been working for these companies for 40 years, and when the worker dies, the company he was working with takes care of his kids and family. But things are changing, and that's why we encourage private companies to develop.
For those family-run companies, would they be willing to disclose internal information that might be relevant for international investors when assessing the company's performance?
This is the problem. That's why they are not coming, although they said they would be ready to go public at least with 40% of the capital, 50 or 76, but still they have to keep their holding on the company. I think with competition they will have to be more open and transparent. You have no other way whether you like it or not, so you have to be ready right from now. But there are good family companies working like Elnefeidi group. We are trying to have them as a public company and to be listed here. Again, I think they will gradually join us. Our main problem is that the Sudanese talk too much about politics, and I think this is wasting our life and our time. I'm living now what I've been living for 30 years; I was comparing some old papers with the present ones and they are almost the same. I think we have to get rid of this.
| What is the foreign investment share on the market?
We have the records. Most foreign investors are investing in Sudatel and in the banks. Because most of the banks, specially trading banks, started with people from Dubai, from Saudi Arabia, etc. For example, in Faysal Islamic Bank, 60% of the capital is coming from foreign investors and 40% from Sudanese shareholders. Now, I think Sudatel is not less than 25% foreign, as Saudi Sudanese bank and the Islamic Development Company. We don't take them into account, because we don't think of them as foreigners.
To your opinion, what are the companies performing the most and that could be of interest for foreign investors?
We have Sudatel at the top, Gum Arabic Company (as you know Sudan is the main producer of gum Arabic), etc. This company, Dr. Musa's company, is one of the best ones. Islamic Investment Company is ranked third. This is a group of companies, with about 14 sister companies, subsidiaries. Then comes the Sudanese French Bank- and I am not speaking about the capitalization, I mean their activity in the market and based on their profitability I would also mention Animal Resources Bank, Omdurman National Bank, and now the Financial Investment Bank. There are also some insurance companies, but as I told you we can say they are family companies. All over the Arab world you'll find that insurance companies are some sort of family companies.
What were your objectives when you first got involved in the creation of the stock exchange? How did they change along the times, and what are your expectations?
The idea took a long time to develop. I think the most difficult part to handle was this alternation between military and democracy. When we started this in the seventies, then Nemeri came, he started to apply the central planning and they nationalized the banks etc. So in nationalization you don't have the chance to develop any market, they even said they didn't want to develop the stock market because there was no stock market in Moscow nor in any of the Soviet Union Republics. So the policy is finally changing towards us. When we started, what was in my mind was: what instrument can we use in order to attract people to invest? It is the only way to develop a country. And that's why we started along with the basic idea. Whenever I think of the fact that if there was no market at all what would has been the situation? We thought that the stock market would push the government to the economy, to a sort of business attitude. We thought these were the ingredients of any kind of stock exchange and that by developing the stock market we could spread this culture to the rest of economy. We thought that we had to lead the people towards this modern way of thinking.
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V.I.P. INTERVIEWS 
