CAIRO: Egyptian appliance maker Olympic Group on Tuesday denied a report that its former chief executive was banned from travel pending questioning over the acquisition of a state firm more than a decade ago. Olympic Group, set to be acquired by Sweden's Electrolux, paid LE 315 million ($53 million) for state-owned company Ideal in 1997, the company said. Newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm reported that Egypt's attorney general had banned a leading Olympic shareholder and former chief executive, Saad El-Din Salama, from travel while he looked into the deal. "I can very comfortably tell you that this is wrong," Olympic Chief Financial Officer Hossam Mestikawi told Reuters. The company has learned that a group of former employees of Ideal had lodged a complaint with prosecutors, saying that Olympic paid too little for Ideal, said Mestikawi. "Those people claim the deal was wrong and, for example, they claim the value was LE 5 billion," he said. "It is nonsense." He said the final privatization price was fair, given the work needed to make Ideal competitive and based on valuations produced by several separate studies of the company. "We raised Ideal's sales from around LE 400 million to LE 2 billion and invested around LE 1 billion to make it survive," said Mestikawi. Electrolux has a tentative agreement to buy Olympic and on May 31 it extended a due diligence period for the acquisition by 15 days. Its preliminary tender offer in October valued the deal, including Olympic's non-core assets, at LE 2.7 billion.
