Of course, they're not the only ones who see opportunities in Saudi Arabia, but they announced yesterday that they are opening an office in Riyadh and staffing it with eight people. I've been hearing from private equity people for months that while dealmaking is never easy, Saudi is a prime target right now. Why? It's simple, they say. Saudi has been overlooked in the past. Government spending is continuing despite the financial crisis, and the economy is the largest in the GCC, even if its industries aren't yet as dynamic or flashy as those in, say, the UAE. People are still spending money, and fundraising isn't as hard as it is elsewhere.

"As the largest Arab economy and the centre of the energy world, Saudi Arabia offers substantial investment opportunities," Amr Dabbagh, the Governor of the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority, was quoted as saying in the article.

As Arif Naqvi, the chief executive of Abraaj, says in the article, PE firms also see Saudi as an important economy because of the expansion opportunities it offers for businesses in their existing portfolios. Even for firms that don't plan to make deals there, in other words, it's still  an important part of a regional strategy.

Private equity firms in the UAE are looking for staff again, albeit at reduced salaries, report Sara Hamdan and Sarmad Khan in The National. Good news for out-of-work financial pros in the UAE? Hard to say it's not, but the reduced salaries thing stings a bit (unless you're not working in finance, in which case it's pure schadenfreude). Interestingly, the hiring trend seems to be confined mostly to PE firms sniffing out cheap assets:

PE firms "are the ones with the cash; the portfolios they are targeting are very reasonably priced," the article quotes Jack Montgomery, a senior consultant at Stanton Chase International, as saying. "They can afford to be more aggressive in hiring talent in order to get the deals they want to get."

So here's the scoop on Ron Herman, the new CEO of GE and Mubadala's $8bn commercial finance joint venture. Herman, who will head up one of Mubadala's richest investments, started at GE Capital, the conglomerate's financing arm, in 1984, according to a bio accompanying a presentation he gave last year. He next served in GE's corporate audit unit before becoming a manager of financial analysis and then vice president of private equity at GE Asset Management. While he was in the asset management unit during the late 1980s and early 1990s, he co-managed a high-yield portfolio that notched 34 per cent annual gains, the bio says.

In 1993, Mr Herman became general manager of corporate M&A, a position he stayed in for 10 years, presiding over deals worth around $10bn. He was appointed in 2003 as CEO and president of GE Equity, where he served until GE brought him in to lead its commercial finance venture with Mubadala.

Mr Herman had served on the board of directors of ShopNBC, a home shopping network that is part-owned by GE Equity. He decided not to stand for re-election to that board last year. He also once served as deputy chairman of AsiaSat, a Hong Kong-based satellite operator that GE acquired a 34 per cent stake in back in 2007. Also in 2007, he (along with three others) received a US patent for a process to integrate business systems in mergers.

I had a short chat today with Jeff Immelt, the chairman and chief executive of General Electric, and Khaldoon al Mubarak, the chief executive of Mubadala, Abu Dhabi's venture capital and investment arm. They announced today that they have assembled management teams for a $8bn commercial finance venture and an executive training centre. You can read about it here.

The commercial finance venture will be based on the GE Capital model, according to Mr al Mubarak. It'll also aim to drum up business in leasing, project finance and other areas worldwide - not just in the UAE or the Middle East. Both Mr Immelt and Mr al Mubarak said the venture was launching at an opportune time, when many other financial services companies are struggling. And both men said the agreement remains as it was last year, despite the financial crisis.

Here are a couple of quotes you won't see (at least not in full) in the web version.

Immelt: We outlined the general understanding last July, so we've been working since then to formalise the agreement. For the [commercial finance arm] we have a business plan, a team, we're developing a pipeline and we're going through a formal regulatory process, and by end of summer we should be moving forward.

Al Mubarak: We're very excited about this partnership. We're big fans of the GE Capital model ... We don't want to box in this joint venture as a UAE joint venture or a Middle East joint venture, and we're going to look at all the opportunities out there ... We've always been committed to this partnership with GE. It has always been a long term commitment based on sound fundamentals.

Also, for your enjoyment, the press release is after the jump.

You'll have to forgive me for my tardiness in posting this on the blog, but it's something that's central in the sukuk world these days: the question of how sukuk defaults will be handled.

We've all heard about Investment Dar's $100m sukuk default. Others are probably on the horizon. I've talked to a bunch of lawyers and bankers who deal with sukuk (and some of whom are dealing with sukuk defaults), and the consensus seems to be that while while there's some measure of clarity - most sukuk have been structured soundly - there's still a lot of uncertainty over how sukuk certificate holders will fit into a company's overall capital structure when it goes into a general default.

In part because of these unresolved issues, I've been hearing that negotiations over the restructuring of major pieces of debt, especially in Kuwait, are not going well. One thing's certain, though: the next generation of sukuk, lawyers say, will be much different from the current one.

...or so says Bloomberg. It's always difficult to gauge how badly-hit the asset management industry has been by the financial crisis. Assets under management are down. That's natural. But people are also making less money and are more fearful of putting what money they do make into managed funds. What's more, the people who asset managers like to court most - the moderately wealthy and the coveted high net worth individual - are getting sparser, a trend that might not reverse anytime soon. According to the survey described by Bloomberg, there are now 242,000 people living in the UK with over £1m in assets, down from 489,000 in 2007.

These numbers reflect "the collapse in the property market, the fall in the values of shares and the 70 percent drop in City bonuses," Douglas McWilliams, chief executive of the UK's Centre for Economics and Business Research, said per Bloomberg. "With property prices near to bottoming out, we would expect the number of millionaires to start to rise again in 2011."

A little refer here to a guest post on Tom Gara's brilliant blog, Beep Beep. We're having a contentious little battle (shall it devlove to fisticuffs?) over the wisdom (or lack thereof) of buying fancy and super-expensive iPhones and Blackberries. My take? If you're given one for free, why not? If not, though, it generally ain't worth it.

The three funds include a quantitative BRIC fund (it invests in Brazil, Russia, India and China), an Asia ex-Japan fund and a Global Equity fund-of-funds, according to this article.

"With this partnership, Salama has demonstrated yet again its commitment to bring the best fund managers and funds available in the Islamic space from across the globe to the doorstep of UAE residents," Noel D'Mello, a general manager at Salama, is quoted as saying.

Salama, aka the Islamic Arab Insurance Company, is a listed company in Dubai. It's also the largest Islamic insurance (takaful and re-takaful) group in the world. Credit Agricole, meanwhile, is France's largest retail banking group.

Note: The original version of this post mistakenly said Salama was partnering with Credit Suisse. I regret the error.

Tom Healy, the CEO of the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, has been making noise for a few months now about new exchange-traded funds: perhaps a couple funds that invest in Asian shares, though the details haven't been pinned down quite yet.

Healy said today, though, that he was "hoping" to start trading in ETFs on the ADX by the end of Ramadan, or near the end of September, according to a Reuters story. Interestingly, he also said that the exchange aimed to start trading in derivatives by "the middle of 2010".

Increasing the selection of instruments available for trading on the exchange has been a key aim of Mr Healy's since he became CEO in September of 2007. The point, of course, is to build the exchange into a regional powerhouse by making it a one-stop shop for traders and brokers.

Shuaa Capital's second monthly investor confidence survey came out today, and the results, while not great, are better than they were last month. For the GCC, the index climbed from 111.6 to 119.4, an increase of 7 per cent. In the UAE, the index rose 4.3 per cent, from 102.6 to 107.0.

The results come as markets in the region have been rising after sharp falls last year. Stocks in Dubai have recovered recently but are still down by over 70 per cent from their highs last year.

The confidence survey, launched last month, queries a variety of market participants about their current views and longer-term outlooks for local markets and economies. The index can range from 0 to 200 and is designed so that a score above 100 indicates positive sentiment, while a score below 100 indicates negative sentiment.

Despite this month's better numbers, Oliver Schutzmann, the head of investor relations at Shuaa, said investor sentiment for the UAE was still "weak".

"Whilst the current investor sentiment is weak for the UAE with just 11.3% of investors reporting positively about the overall economy, the outlook is very different. 43.7% of investors expect the UAE economy to improve over the next six months, with just 16.9% anticipating a decline in the overall economic condition," he said.

Investors picked the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange as the most undervalued, with 59.2 per cent predicting a rise in prices. Another 60 per cent saw an improvement in economic conditions across the GCC during the next six months.