A Mobily office in the Kingdom.

The board of directors of Mobily has suspended its CEO Khalid Omar Al-Kaf and put his deputy Serkan Okandan in temporary charge pending an investigation into accounting errors.

Al-Kaf will be suspended until Mobily’s audit committee completes its investigation into these errors, the company said in a statement posted on the Tadawul website.

The company, Kingdom’s No.2 telecom operator, said that this decision was taken at the board meeting on Friday, Nov. 21.

Al-Kaf was recently honored as the best CEO in the telecom sector at the ITP annual ceremony in Riyadh because of his outstanding success and remarkable achievements.

Al-Kaf was the Gulf’s longest-serving CEO in the sector, taking the helm at Mobily in 2005 after 19 years at the UAE’s Etisalat, which owns 27.5 percent of Mobily.

Okandan, Etisalat’s chief financial officer, was appointed as deputy CEO of Mobily in October, while Etisalat’s CEO Ahmad Julfar is also a director of Mobily and chairman of its Risk Management Committee.

Another senior Etisalat executive Essa Al-Haddad also sits on Mobily’s board, according to Etisalat’s 2013 annual report.

Mobily’s share price has fallen 36 percent since late October, when rumors began to circulate that something was amiss with the company’s results, wiping out SR6.56 billion from the value of Etisalat’s stake, according to Reuters calculations.

Mobily began operations in 2005, and it turned profitable the following year, marking the start of the operator’s remarkable rise.

Its annual profits more than quadrupled from 2006 to 2009 to reach SR3 billion that year, Reuters data shows.

Mobily reported a record annual profit in 2013 of SR6.68 billion, up 11 percent from the previous year, although that result has now been cut in the restatement of earnings.

Okandan is a graduate of faculty of economics and administrative sciences at Bosphorus University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Before joining Mobily, he worked since 2006 as group CFO of Turkcell where he led the finance function of a publicly quoted company having operations in Turkey, Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Also, he was the acting CEO of Turkcell’s operations in Ukraine during 2010 and representing Turkcell as a board member at its domestic and international operations.

Deputy CEO Serkan Okandan

 
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