Moroccan billionaire Moulay Hafid Elalamy acquires majority stake in Sweden's Arktika Capital, a debt portfolio specialist

Moulay Hafid Elalamy, the Moroccan billionaire who chairs Saham Group and is simultaneously engineering a turnaround at France's TP, the world's largest customer relations company, has acquired a majority stake in Arktika Capital AB, a Swedish licensed credit institution that buys and manages non-performing loan portfolios from banks and financial institutions across Europe, according to Africa Intelligence.

The acquisition, reported by Africa Intelligence on May 22, adds a Nordic financial services asset to a growing international portfolio that Elalamy has been assembling at pace since completing the sale of Saham's African insurance operations to Sanlam in 2018.

Arktika Capital AB is not a consumer-facing neobank in the conventional sense. It is a regulated Swedish credit institution, designated by Sweden's financial regulator Finansinspektionen as a Category 4 bank, that operates in two distinct but complementary business lines. Its primary activity is the acquisition and management of distressed loan portfolios, purchasing non-performing loans from banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions across Europe at a discount and recovering value from those portfolios over time. Its secondary activity is retail deposit-taking through its Arktika Spar product, which offers Swedish consumers fixed-term savings accounts with competitive interest rates between 2.00 and 2.25 percent across terms from three to 48 months. All deposits are protected under the Swedish deposit guarantee scheme.

The non-performing loan market Arktika operates in has been generating significant interest from specialised investors across Europe. Rising interest rates between 2022 and 2025 pushed loan delinquency rates higher across several European markets, expanding the supply of distressed portfolios available for purchase. A key theme at the NPL Europe 2026 conference in London, which Arktika's team attended in April, was the growing volume of Stage 2 loans, credit exposures not yet classified as non-performing but showing early signs of stress, moving toward transaction as banks proactively manage their balance sheets. The conference also flagged rising NPL volumes specifically in Germany and France, two markets where Elalamy's Saham Group and TP have existing commercial relationships and institutional knowledge.

Elalamy's logic in acquiring Arktika Capital is consistent with the broader pattern of his post-Saham investment strategy. Since the Sanlam transaction, he has moved methodically into financial services and technology assets with European regulatory standing and cross-border growth potential. His accumulation of TP shares, now standing at 14.87 percent of the Paris-listed company, is the most visible expression of that strategy. The acquisition of Saham Bank, formed from his purchase of Societe Generale Maroc in 2024, gave him a Moroccan retail banking platform. Arktika Capital adds a regulated European credit institution with a specialist position in distressed debt, a market that historically generates strong risk-adjusted returns for sophisticated investors willing to manage workout processes over multi-year horizons.

The retail savings component of Arktika's model, while smaller than the institutional NPL business, provides a stable, diversified funding source that complements the group's debt portfolio activities. Fixed-term deposits from Swedish retail savers give Arktika a predictable liability base against which to match the recoveries from its NPL portfolio investments.

Elalamy, 62, built Saham from a call centre business founded in Morocco in 1995 into one of Africa's largest diversified conglomerates before pivoting to financial services and technology after the insurance exit. Forbes estimated his net worth at approximately $2.1 billion in its most recent ranking. The TP stake, acquired through a combination of equity swaps and open market purchases since March 2026, represents his most ambitious public market bet. Arktika Capital is a more targeted, less visible acquisition, but one that gives his investment platform a foothold in the European financial distressed asset market at a moment when dealflow in that space is accelerating.