Emirates NBD, Russia's Sberbank revise price for Turkey's Denizbank

Dubai's biggest lender Emirates NBD has agreed to pay a higher price for 99.9 percent of Turkey's Denizbank owned by Russia's Sberbank.

Emirates NBD and Sberbank said Wednesday that they updated the sale agreement on Tuesday to increase the price to 15.48 billion Turkish liras ($2.77 billion) from TL 14.6 billion in the deal announcement in May 2018.

Sberbank, Russia's biggest bank by assets, bought Denizbank in 2012 for TL 6.5 billion as it was trying to establish a presence abroad.

Denizbank's equity amounted to 15.51 billion lira as of Dec. 31, Emirates NBD said in a bourse statement.

The deal will help Emirates NBD diversify its business and establish itself as a leading bank in the region, the bank's vice chairman Hesham Abdulla al-Qassim said in May.

DenizBank was first acquired by Turkey's Zorlu Holding in 1997 from the Privatization Administration. The bank was further acquired in October 2006 by Dexia, a Franco-Belgian financial group from Europe. Having been run by Dexia for six years, DenizBank has operated under Sberbank since 2012.

The Emirates NBD banking group is an important player in the UAE's corporate and retail banking sector. It has been operating actively in different areas, including Islamic banking, private banking and asset management. Emirates NBD runs 230 branches worldwide and has operations in the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, Singapore and the U.K. and representatives in China and Indonesia.