XRG, OIA and the EBRD broaden their reach as mandates widen past home markets

The theme of the day is investors widening their mandates beyond home markets. The EBRD’s new Egyptian vehicle with Scatec is cleared to finance across the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean. XRG has gone to Eni for Libyan oil and gas after Azerbaijan, Venezuela, and Texas, as it looks to push growth outside the Gulf. Meanwhile, Oman’s sovereign wealth fund is moving from country-by-country JVs to a single fund covering five.

The EBRD is committing up to USD 221 mn for 40% of a new vehicle holding Scatec’s Egyptian renewables projects. Scatec keeps 60% of Egypt Renewables Holdings B.V. under a share purchase agreement, according to statements from Scatec and the EBRD (pdf). The vehicle can also finance projects across the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, the EBRD says.

The two sides describe the money differently. The EBRD calls the full USD 221 mn (EUR 191 mn) an equity investment. Scatec puts roughly USD 170 mn of it in equity and the rest in project-level guarantees.

What it holds: 40% of the 1.1 GW Obelisk solar and storage plant, 51% of the 900 MW Shadwan wind farm, and about 60% each of phase 1 of the Egypt Aluminium (Dandara) project and Energy Valley, a 1.95 GW solar plant with 3.9 GWh of storage, per Scatec, with minority co-investors alongside. The EBRD puts the portfolio at an additional 2.7 GW of solar, 900 MW of wind, and 4.2 GWh of storage for Egypt’s grid — Energy Valley alone is most of that solar and almost all of the storage, by our math.

XRG is in early talks to buy a stake in Eni’s Libyan oil and gas business. Adnoc’s international investment arm has approached the Italian group about its Libya operations, Reuters reports, citing two people familiar with the matter.

What’s on the table: Eni has worked in Libya since 1959 through Mellitah Oil & Gas, its joint venture with the National Oil Corporation, and the country produced 162k boe / d for it last year, about 10% of group output. Eni recently completed the Bouri Gas Utilization Project, which will send around 700 mn cbm a year of recovered gas into the Libyan market, with spare capacity earmarked for export to Europe.

The war has made growing outside the Gulf more urgent, one source told Reuters. XRG has bought into Azerbaijan’s Absheron gas and condensate field, an offshore gas field in Venezuela, and the Rio Grande LNG terminal in Texas, and is targeting 20-25 mn tons a year of LNG capacity by 2035. It already works with Eni and Argentina’s YPF on a USD multi- bn LNG project there.

Oman’s sovereign fund is leading a USD 500 mn fund for Central Asia and the Caucasus. The Oman Investment Authority has pulled together a consortium of sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors for an early-November launch, with an Omani manager running it and a mandate across Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, Oman Observer reports.

It is the first multilateral vehicle Oman has led in the region. Until now, it has gone in bilaterally with sovereign funds and state-backed partners — a USD 200 mn joint fund with Azerbaijan Investment Holding, a USD 150 mn JV with Kazakhstan’s Samruk-Kazyna, and a 15-year-old Uzbek-Oman platform worth some USD 266.7 mn as of 2025. The new fund is about 81% of those three combined.

PayTabs Group has signed an MoU to buy SeaPay from Saudi-listed Arab Sea Information System. Arab Sea would sell its entire holding in wholly owned Arab Sea Financial, which trades as SeaPay, to the payment processor, Argaam reports. The MoU runs six months from signing or until a final sale and purchase agreement, whichever comes first. Neither side has put a price tag on the transaction yet.

Saudi fractional property platform Ghanem has raised USD 1.5 mn in a pre-seed extension, taking the round to USD 8.6 mn. Real estate companies and strategic angels joined the extension, which builds on the USD 7.1 mn it raised last November with Al Romaih Group, it said in a press release (pdf). The money goes to product development, widening the range of properties, and partnerships.

The platform now plugs into the Real Estate Registry, where investors’ fractional stakes are registered in their own names. Ghanem has issued digital deeds to 580 investors in its first income-generating property and started paying out rental income, against the SAR 1 bn of assets under management it told us last year it was targeting within three years.

REMEMBER- Ghanem is still inside the Real Estate General Authority’s regulatory sandbox, and its path to a permanent licence depends on a national tokenization law, CEO Saleh Alghamdi told our Saudi desk in April. He said then it expected to open to non-Saudi investors this year and was looking at tokenizing off-plan properties with the regulator.

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