The Development Bank of Ethiopia replaced the company appointed General Manager of the Ayka Addis Group with an expat, saying this was a management intervention based on the company’s stagnant performance over the past four years.
“We hired the best expert in the area to replace the owner who had been leading the company since its establishment,” Haileyesus Bekele, the President of the Policy Bank told Capital. “It was not appropriate  for that person to claim leadership just because they owned the company.”
The General Manager has been assigned to prepare a report for the Bank about the status of the company.
“We will take other action based on his report in order to transform the company,” Haileyesus added. “I believe he will bring the change we are aspiring for.”
The company which was founded in Alemgena Town invested USD 240 million when it was established in 2010.
The company has created 7,500 jobs and was invited to invest in Ethiopia by the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Mulatu Tesome(PhD) who was an Ambassador to Turkey at the time.
The company acquired a loan of 2.3 billion birr from the bank and then, kept declaring an increasing rate of loss since 2013. The Bank had been trying to help the company in order to get some of its money back but eventually felt that things were not working out.
The policy bank has a good track record of recovering businesses that were abandoned. The Else Addis was abandoned by its Turkish Investors and later taken over by the creditor, DBE, which took only a few months to make millions of birr in profit.
Capital attempted to get a statement from the company but was unsuccessful.