CAIRO, Feb 15 (Aswat Masriya) - The Egyptian stock exchange climbed on Monday across the benchmark and secondary indices after a large acquisition deal was announced. 

The benchmark index EGX 30 rose by 0.8 per cent to 5,800 points, up from 5,754 at the beginning of trading. Meanwhile, EGX 70 for small and medium enterprises and the broader EGX 100 climbed by 0.95 and 0.76 per cent, respectively.

The Egyptian stock market had inched down by 1.03 per cent on Sunday but today Egypt's largest listed lender Commercial International Bank said it accepted an offer by Orascom Telecom to buy the bank’s investment arm CI Capital for EGP 924 million ($118.01 million).

Orascom is owned by Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, who made an initial offer to buy CI Capital on Dec. 17. This will be the second acquisition by the Egyptian billionaire of a large financial institution after he recently bought Beltone Financial for EGP 650 million.

Sawiris is one of the country’s most prominent businessmen and the founder of the Free Egyptians Party, a political party which is represented in the House of Representatives by 65 seats out of a total of 596 seats.