An Introduction to Amanah Capital

Amanah Capital is not your typical investment firm. It was born out of a generational mindset—one that understands that capital, when applied with patience, insight, and proximity to real-world flows, becomes a strategic force.

Founded by Karim Al-Mansour, Amanah Capital represents the evolution of a family investment platform over three generations that began with Abdullah Al-Mansour setting up and financing automotive dealerships in the Gulf, which expanded into fuel infrastructure and real estate, and today operates at the highest levels of global markets, commodities, and private capital. At its core, Amanah is about applying principal-led thinking to complex, opaque, or misunderstood corners of the global economy.

A Dual Mandate: Principal Investment & Strategic Advisory

Amanah Capital is structured around two distinct, yet complementary engines:

1. Principal Investments

Amanah allocates proprietary family capital across five focus areas:

• Private Equity: Growth-stage investments in energy, financials, tech platforms, and tech-enabled industrials.
• Real Assets: Prime real estate in UK, France, Switzerland and UAE—often adjacent to legacy holdings or infrastructure.
• Infrastructure: Strategic stakes in logistics hubs, port infrastructure, and energy transition corridors across the Middle East.
• Commodities: Opportunistic and structural trades in oil, LNG, metals, and agri—leveraging decades of trading insight.
• Alternatives: Venture capital, special situations, and distressed assets, with a preference for asymmetric setups and informational edge.

These are not passive bets. Amanah was an early backer of a European Credit Platform, now managing over $2 billion in credit strategies, and a Venture Capital Firm in New York, seeded with $20 million in mid 2015, now with over $1.4 billion under management. These relationships aren’t just investments—they're extensions of a philosophy: back people early, and stay long.

2. Strategic & Sovereign Consulting Group

This division works discreetly with sovereigns, state-owned enterprises, and global commodity firms on:

• Hedging and risk frameworks (energy, FX, rates)
• Oil-linked debt issuance and sovereign asset monetization
• Distressed asset acquisition and recovery strategy
• FX reserve structuring and central bank advisory
• Sovereign wealth fund strategic asset allocation
• Supply chain and commodity resilience planning

In an era where the lines between capital markets and geopolitics blur, Amanah serves as a trusted signal amidst the noise—offering discreet, technically rigorous advice with skin in the game.

Amanah Means Trust

True to its name—“Amanah” meaning “trust” or “custodianship” in Arabic—the firm has always prioritized long-term alignment over short-term returns. It doesn’t raise funds. It doesn’t chase mandates. It operates with the quiet confidence of a group that has already compounded capital across three generations, and now seeks to partner with those who value discretion, clarity, and real-world grounding.

The Amanah ecosystem includes:

• Amanah Holdings Trust (UK HMRC-registered, London E14 9ZW)
• Amanah Sovereign and Strategic Consulting Group (ASSCG,London E14 9ZW)
• Amanah AM Family Trust (Liechtenstein, Aeulestrasse 4, 9490 Vaduz)

These vehicles hold and deploy capital, sponsor managers, and support family members building their own paths in finance and investment. As the next generation takes on greater responsibility, Amanah continues to evolve—balancing institutional precision with the agility of a founder-led, family-backed platform.

Amanah Sovereign & Strategic Consulting Group

Amanah Sovereign & Strategic Consulting Group is the high-trust, high-conviction advisory arm of Amanah Capital—built to serve sovereigns, global commodity players, family offices, and institutional allocators navigating systemic uncertainty, resource scarcity, and geopolitical realignment.

Operating at the nexus of macro, commodities, and capital strategy, this group functions less like a traditional consultancy and more like a special situations unit. Our clients rely on us not for boilerplate templates, but for insight forged in market complexity—and translated into strategies that can be executed under pressure.

Discreet Advisory. Real Outcomes.

We’ve advised:

• A Gulf sovereign wealth fund restructuring oil-linked credit facilities for infrastructure development.
• A Latin American treasury exploring LNG-backed debt issuance as a hedge against dollar volatility.
• A central bank weighing physical gold reserves as part of a broader currency volatility hedge.
• A global systemically important bank (G-SIB) on hedging battery supply chain risk across the Congo–China corridor.

Amanah Sovereign is the quiet, high-trust partner in the room when clarity matters most.

Our Focus Areas

We operate in spaces where traditional banks, consultants, and asset managers are too slow, too rigid, or simply out of their depth. Our core domains include:

• Energy Finance: Structuring oil-, gas-, or innovative instrument-linked funding for sovereigns and SOEs. Building fiscal hedging programs for commodity-exposed revenues.
• Strategic Commodities Advisory: From crude and LNG to rare earths. Structuring offtake deals, derivatives overlays, and price stabilization mechanisms.
• Sovereign Macro Strategy: FX regime design, reserve diversification (including non-dollar assets), sovereign credit risk overlays, and debt portfolio stress-testing.
• Infrastructure Structuring: Capital stack design for strategic assets (ports, pipelines, data centers), including hybrid financing models and long-dated cash flow planning.
• Distress & Dislocation Advisory: Tactical solutions for CRE refinancing, blocked payments, trade finance gaps, and cross-border settlement freezes.

Why Sovereigns, Why Now

The 2020s are not an era of passive reserve management or simple bilateral lending. Sovereigns and their adjacent entities are increasingly required to think like hedge funds and act like investment banks. Fragmentation, dual circulation, de-dollarization, and sanctions risk are not theoretical—they are operational realities.

ASSCG helps sovereigns and aligned institutions preserve liquidity, hedge fiscal volatility, and build long-term resilience—without overpaying for optionality.

Our Edge

• Skin in the Game: We don’t just advise—we often co-invest, and frequently structure compensation around real outcomes, not slide decks.
• Buy-Side DNA: Our team brings decades of experience managing proprietary and family capital in global macro, commodities, and structured finance along with real on the ground relationships with current and former intelligence operatives across multiple geographies. We understand how capital behaves and needs to behave in stress.
• Institutional Trust: We’ve been retained by sovereigns, pensions, commodity firms, and regulators not for theory—but because our frameworks work when markets don’t.

Case Snapshots

• Structured a bespoke oil-linked note for a GCC sovereign to fund infrastructure while maintaining upside exposure.
• Structured a discreet secondary exit for a GCC sovereign after alarming them to fraud by PE fund.
• Developed an LNG hedging playbook for a Southeast Asian government facing currency volatility and energy cost spikes.
• Advised a German pension fund on alternative asset rebalancing after our work on LP-GP alignment in semi-liquid funds.
• Structured a trade finance overlay for rare-earth extraction rights with an African sovereign seeking to enhance future leverage.

Amanah Sovereign isn’t in the business of advising—we’re in the business of building structures that endure, strategies that scale, and partnerships that matter.

Global Markets by Karim Al-Mansour

About Karim Al-Mansour

Karim Al-Mansour is the CEO & Founder of Amanah Capital, a multi-strategy investment firm with mandates spanning private equity, real assets, infrastructure, commodities, and alternatives. Over a career spanning 15+ years, he has held senior roles at sovereign wealth funds and global trading houses, navigating the complexities of global markets across trading, structuring, and capital allocation.

Karim manages his family's investment trust, which includes LP positions in leading VC, PE firms, and hedge funds, as well as a portfolio of seeded funds that now manage billions. He is often retained by regulators, sovereign funds, and pensions for confidential strategy dialogue and market structuring insight.

Karim holds an MSc in Finance and Economics from the London School of Economics (LSE) and a BSc in Banking & International Finance from Cass Business School.

Global Markets by Karim Al-Mansour

In an age where financial commentary is often loud but shallow, Global Markets by Karim Al-Mansour has emerged as a rare voice—sharp, unfiltered, and structurally literate. Launched less than a year ago, the Substack has quickly gained a cult following among the world’s most sophisticated allocators, regulators, and capital markets practitioners, growing to over 56,000 subscribers across 102 countries.

More than just a newsletter, Global Markets is a strategic dialogue—part market diary, part geopolitical debrief, part backchannel memo. It’s read by the people who move markets: central bank governors, sovereign wealth fund chiefs, hedge fund managers, private equity veterans, infrastructure investors, and the decision-makers who sit on investment committees with trillion-dollar implications.

Karim doesn’t write for clicks. He writes to distill the signal from the noise—connecting liquidity trends to balance sheet shifts, asset pricing quirks to geopolitical realignments, and obscure financial architecture to systemic risk. His style is direct but cerebral. He often writes as if the reader is sitting across from him in a London café or on a late-night call with a sovereign client. The result is engagement that is visceral and real: readers feel seen, challenged, and occasionally called out.

Some of his pieces have prompted institutional consequences. A sharp critique of the Czech central bank’s flirtation with crypto reserves triggered a diplomatic volley of angry letters—which Karim welcomed as a litmus test for where ideology still clouds judgment. Another post on semi-liquid funds attracted interest from a German pension fund CIO, which has since evolved into a long-term advisory dialogue. For Karim, these reactions are not just feedback—they’re market intelligence in raw form.

The newsletter tackles topics that others avoid or oversimplify:

• Why semi-liquid funds could quietly reshape LP-GP dynamics forever.
• How GPU futures might become the next macroeconomic barometer.
• The hidden ripple effects of German bank retrenchment from U.S. real estate.
• How a $10,000 trade at Nomura revealed the most fragile assumptions of modern market-making.

What sets Global Markets apart isn’t just what it covers—it’s who it’s written for and how. Karim’s audience includes:

• Top quartile hedge fund managers.
• Senior executives from private equity firms such as Apollo, Carlyle, and Barings.
• Senior executives from VC funds.
• Regulators across the EU, US, UK, and Singapore.
• CIOs and heads of allocation from sovereign wealth funds, pensions, and family offices.

It’s also quietly become a channel for private dialogues, fundraising interest, and policy feedback loops—an influence network in motion.

But for Karim, Global Markets is less about media than mindset. It’s a place to test thesis formation, provoke reaction, and build strategic consensus among people who rarely agree publicly—but who understand the stakes privately.

In a financial world addicted to noise, Global Markets offers clarity. In a capital cycle driven by hype, it offers consequence-based analysis. And in a time where everyone’s watching charts, it reminds you to watch the architecture.

Read Global Markets

Contact Us

Amanah Capital and Amanah Strategic & Sovereign Consulting Group welcome inquiries from sovereign entities, institutional investors, corporates, and strategic partners. Please direct your inquiry to the appropriate contact below.

Institutional Investors & Capital Allocation Inquiries

For sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, endowments, and institutional investors interested in Amanah Capital’s private equity, alternative investments, or structured finance strategies.
Contact: [email protected]

Government & Sovereign Advisory

For ministries of finance, central banks, and sovereign entities seeking advisory services in commodities, structured finance, and macroeconomic risk management.
Contact: [email protected]

Corporate & Strategic Partnerships

For corporates, global commodity traders, and financial institutions exploring financing solutions, risk management, and bespoke structuring.
Contact: [email protected]

Media & Speaking Engagements

For press inquiries, media interviews, and speaking engagements for Karim Al-Mansour.
Contact: [email protected]

Careers & Talent

For professionals seeking opportunities within Amanah Capital’s investment, trading, and advisory divisions.
Contact: [email protected]

General Inquiries

For all other inquiries related to Amanah Capital and Amanah Strategic & Sovereign Consulting Group.
Contact: [email protected]

Head Office

Address: 10 Park Drive, Canary Wharf, London E14 9ZW, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 020 8058 0793

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