DUBAI: Michel Accad, the chief executive of Kuwait’s Gulf Bank, has resigned from his post for personal reasons, the lender said in a bourse statement yesterday. Accad’s resignation will be effective on January 2, 2014 and a replacement will be appointed soon, the statement said. Accad joined Gulf Bank in 2009 and was instrumental in steering the lender out of its worst financial difficulties. Gulf Bank was rescued by the Kuwaiti central bank in 2008, after about 260m dinars ($921.6m) of derivatives losses. Its troubles prompted the government to guarantee all deposits in local banks to restore confidence. The bank, the country’s fourth-largest lender, had reported a 17 percent rise in second-quarter net profit to 6.3m dinars ($22.1m).
PetroRabigh shuts ethane cracker
KHOBAR: Saudi Arabia’s PetroRabigh shut its ethane cracker last week because of a leak from water pipelines linked to the unit, the company said yesterday. The company, a joint venture between national oil giant Saudi Aramco and Japan’s Sumitomo Chemical, said the leak occurred on Oct. 16 and that it shut the unit as a precautionary measure to prevent damage. The unit, which has an annual production capacity of 1.3 million tonnes of ethylene, will be back online within three days, the company said. PetroRabigh estimated the financial loss due to the outage at SR81m ($22m). Agencies
