GCC banks account for 65.4 per cent of the total Arab banks' assets which have reached $1.29 trillion, said a top banking official citing the latest statistics for the last year.

'The UAE banks are in the lead with total assets of $335.8 billion followed by Saudi and Bahraini banks,' Union of Arab Banks chairman Adnan Yousif told our sister paper Akhbar Al Khaleej.

The UAE, Morocco and Oman have registered a 40 per cent growth last year when compared to 2006.

Bahraini banks achieved 31.2 per cent growth while the figure for Algerian banks was 28 per cent.

Saudi aand Egyptian banks achieved 25 per cent growth, he added.-TradeArabia News Service