Etisalat appoints new CFO for Mobily

Etisalat Group today announced the appointment of Kais Ben Hamida as the chief financial officer of Mobily.

Hamida brings to Mobily and the Group over twenty years of international business and finance experience across Middle East, North America, and Europe. After his early start in banking, he spent a significant part of his career at the Orange Group holding several leadership positions related to M&A, project financing, business development and business monitoring, before assuming the role of CFO at Mobinil in Egypt in 2011.

Hamida began his career at the World Bank where he was in charge of the financing of infrastructure projects, and then moved to the structured finance division at Société Générale. In 1997 he joined the Orange Group and was responsible for project finance at FTMI before moving to Orange SA as a director of financial operations in charge of the Orange Group portfolio in Scandinavia and Middle East.

In 2003 he was appointed director of the Group CFO Office and was appointed deputy head of M&A. In 2009, he spent two years as a partner with a private equity fund focusing on investments in the infrastructure arena before his appointment in 2011 as CFO of Mobinil.

Mobily has been under investigation by Saudi Arabia’s Capital Market Authority since November, after the operator restated figures for 2013 and the first nine months of 2014, which it blamed on an accounting error. The issue led to the suspension, and then sacking of founding CEO Khalid Al-Kaf.