Mashreq Bank to facilitate sustainable financing worth $30bn by 2030  

Mashreq Bank to facilitate sustainable financing worth $30bn by 2030  

SHARM EL-SHEIKH: Mashreq Bank, the oldest privately owned bank in the UAE, will increase the amount of its sustainable financing to $30 billion by 2030, a senior official said. "There’s a huge appetite for green and other forms of sustainable finance, and we only see it is increasing,” Tarek El-Nahas, senior executive vice president and group head of international banking at Mashreq Bank, told Arab News. He added: “The regional economy is still very robust, and MENA is the fastest growing region globally, so we are not seeing downward pressure here.” However, there is also a misconception that green lending and green finance are a cost to businesses, which El-Nahas rejected. “We are seeing that greener forms of finance can also succeed, and because they are often very-long tenure deals, they generally make returns across the economic cycle,” he said. Mashreq Bank, participating at the UN Climate Change Conference in Egypt, had facilitated sustainable finance deals worth 11.7 billion since October 2020 across the Gulf Cooperation Council, India, Turkey, and Africa. “It included a range of deals and projects, including a sustainability-linked dual tranche of Islamic or conventional syndicated term loan for Nogaholding in Bahrain,” El-Nahas said. This deal is