Consultants and financial advisors are incredibly busy across the GCC, devising government strategy, public private partnership frameworks and project procurement models.

Low oil prices have pushed a fundamental rethink of how projects should be funded, and consultants are working or bidding on dozens of advisory deals in Saudi Arabia and beyond.

This means most planned projects have remained in the structuring stages, and new projects will not be announced until these strategies have been worked out in detail and been approved.

The existing pipeline has also thinned out due to project delays and cancellations.

In most GCC countries, banks are focusing on one or two upcoming projects, such as Abu Dhabi’s 350MW solar project, or Oman’s independent water projects in Salalah and Sharqiyah.

With Ramadan falling in early summer, most of the upcoming transactions are not aiming to close before September. These include Kuwait Clean Fuels 2020 project’s international tranche and the Bahrain LNG loan for its gas terminal project.

This is being exacerbated by the tighter liquidity situation across the GCC. Banks’ cost of funding is on the rise, so they are being more selective about where to lend.

Most syndicated loans are still seeing good interest, but local banks are increasingly rejecting them because the pricing is too low for their funding profile.

Overall, banks are expecting a very slow summer for syndicated loans. Despite the tight liquidity, they need to keep lending to maintain profitability, but see very few transactions in the pipeline.