What is the capital structure of BIBD?
BIBD has a capital of 900 million Brunei dollars ($650 million). This is a decent sized capital base and we are very highly capitalized. Our capital adequacy is around 20 percent. Effectively, if we wanted to we could go and expand the business based on the capital we have. Can you expand on the share ownership structure of BIBD? About 60 percent of the shares are held by the Brunei Ministry of Finance. Another 25 percent of the equity is held by The Sultan of Bruneis Charitable Foundation. Some 6 percent of the equity is owned by Mizuho Bank of Japan, which has been in Brunei historically for the last quarter of a century. The remaining 9 percent of the shares are held by truly retail investors in Brunei totaling about 6,000 shareholders. Brunei itself is not a big market. So how do you position BIBD especially in terms of cross-border regional activities? Our activities have traditionally been to gather deposits and to provide financing. We are in the process of going through a major
