Citigroup Inc. is expected to receive foreign investors’ support once more, after facing a $4.21 billion loss in the fourth quarter of the last year. The names most likely to do that are Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and China Development Bank. The exact terms of the investments are unclear for the time being, but according to several sources, the Chinese representatives are said to invest around $2 billion.

 The purpose of Citigroup is to gather between $8 billion and $10 billion. It is for the second time that Citigroup relies on Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s funds, after a similar situation at the beginning of the 1990s, due to bad commercial real estate investments. The Saudi Prince currently holds a 4 percent stake of Citibank’s holdings, being Citibank’s largest individual shareholder ever since.

In November 2007 however, Citigroup sold $7.5 billion worth of stakes to Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, who came to hold a 5 percent stake for the time being. Last year had also been a year of changes for Citigroup, after Charles O. Prince III resigned abruptly in November.

Vikram S. Pandit, who had only been with Citigroup for six months, was then named Chief Executive in December, to the surprise of most analysts and investors. But Robert Rubin, the interim chairman since Prince’s resignation, said Pandit: “has an exceptional insight and strength and a real ability to get things done […] From the beginning I thought we may end up where we did.” (Business Week)

Pandit already started to make changes in his team, and is carefully supervising the efforts to reorganize the investment bank. Citigroup is American financial services company based in New York, and was declared the largest company in the world according to a Forbes Global 2000 report released in March 2007, with assets of over $2.4 trillion.