A top Mauritius official told PTI that "An Indian company has won the bid for acquiring majority stake of First City Bank."
"The Indian company is not a bank, but from the financial services sector," the official said without giving details.
This is the second Mauritius bank to be acquired by an Indian entity after State Bank of India bought 51 per cent stake in Indian Ocean International Bank last year.
Headquartered at Port-Louis, FCB has been in trouble since 2004 after regulator Bank of Mauritius carried out inspections regarding adherence of prudential norms and prescribed guidelines relating to capital adequacy, lending and liquidity management policies.
Late last year, the Bank of Mauritius had said that it was monitoring closely the situation at the FCB and would take all necessary action to maintain the confidence of the public in the FCB and banking sector as a whole.
The internal conflicts involving the top management and certain board members of the FCB had come to the fore and there has been public disclosure of customer information.
In fact, the regulator was peeved by the leakage of its report on FCB and had asked the bank to investigate it and take action in this regard.
FCB started operations in May 2002 after having acquired all the banking businesses of the former Delphis Bank, which had 13 branches, 58,000 customers and 200 employees then.
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