Banking bust-up

Egypt wants its own man to run an all-Africa bank everyone else is angry

Leadership in Africa is an old Egyptian dream. It looks a lot less solid since President Hosni Mubarak's government expelled Jean-Louis Ekra, the new Ivorian president of Afreximbank, a multilateral African trade bank based in Cairo. Ekra is temporarily running Afreximbank from London; Egypt has written to its correspondent banks there, urging them not to follow Ekra's instructions. The Bank's board threatens to move it to another African state and wants the Egyptian government both to rescind the expulsion order on Ekra and to reverse instructions from the Central Bank of Egypt that two state-owned banks must default on loans worth US$40 million.

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