In what may be an acid test for investor confidence in post-war Iraq, a revamped Baghdad Stock Exchange is due to open later this month and may have more than 100 companies listed by the end of the year.
Financial and technical advisers with the US-led civilian authority in Iraq have been working for months to get the exchange back on its feet after it shut down nearly a year ago and its listings were frozen.
After several delays, mostly due to technical problems and after potential locations for the bourse fell through, the market is expected to reopen in a disused Baghdad hotel where it will remain until a fully modernised fixed site is ready.
"We're on track to get it done by the end of the month," Michael Pierson, a spokesman for the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority which is overseeing the exchange's re-launch, said this week.
According to bankers familiar with the project, the plan would be to re-list 10 to 15 stocks a month, with companies only being re-quoted once their accounts have been verified by internationally recognised auditors and checks have been made into major shareholders to weed out former regime members.
Ultimately, 114 companies could be re-listed on the BSE, which first opened in 1992 and quickly became a hot-seat of financial speculation.
Its last official trading day was March 19, 2003 - the day before the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein was launched.
Atlas Investment Group, a Jordan-based investment bank, this week unveiled a 150-page guide to Iraq's capital markets, with extensive research on all 114 companies set to re-list and details on more than 40 formerly state-owned enterprises that may soon be privatised.
Maria Khoury, the head of research at Atlas, believes Baghdad's market will offer regional and international investors a prime opportunity to test Iraq's financial waters without over-committing in a high-security-risk country.
"For those who don't want to completely buy into an Iraqi company but want to have a share in the potential gains that could be made by investing, this is going to be the best way," she said on Thursday.
Investors in Jordan, Lebanon and the Gulf states have expressed strong interest in Iraqi equities, she said, and international fund managers are also looking at adding some higher-risk, higher-return holdings to their portfolios.
Previously, stocks on the market were categorised under four sectors - agriculture, services, banking and industrials, with the latter two being the more dominant. It is not yet clear what sort of reorganisation will take place once the market is re-launched.
Initially, trading is expected to done manually, but the exchange will eventually move to an automated system. Settlement will be handled by an international group.
The biggest stock before the war was Baghdad Carbonated Beverages with a market capitalisation of just under 47 billion Iraqi dinars. At the official exchange rate at the time, that would have equalled a massive $150 billion.
The black market exchange rate of 2,000 dinars to the dollar would have put it at a more credible $23.5 million.
The current exchange rate is about 1,400 dinars to the dollar, about 30 percent stronger than three months ago, suggesting investors in dinar-denominated assets may stand to make solid returns.
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