Africa

Employees at South African audit firm Nkonki Inc. applied to a Pretoria court to block the company’s liquidation and have it put into administration instead so there’s a chance the business can be rescued, according to a court filing. The auditing profession is under pressure in South Africa with Nkonki and the local unit of KPMG LLP losing clients after being linked to the politically connected Gupta family, Bloomberg News reported. Deloitte & Touche LLP is also under scrutiny for having audited scandal-ridden South African retailer Steinhoff International Holdings NV.

If it wasn’t for two sons in France sending money, pensioner George Kimbembe says he’d have joined the ranks of the dead in the Republic of Congo’s capital, Brazzaville. That foreign cash is a lifeline for the 76-year-old former civil servant who hasn’t received his pension for 13 months. It’s a shortfall emblematic of a fiscal crisis engulfing the oil-producing central African country that was battered by lower crude prices, owes creditors more than $9 billion and is seeking an International Monetary Fund bailout, Bloomberg News reported.

Congo Republic’s government said it’s reached agreement with the International Monetary Fund on three key areas as it seeks a bailout from the multilateral lender, Bloomberg News reported. The oil-producing central African nation owes creditors at least $9.14 billion and is struggling to pay its debts because of a decline in oil prices since 2014. The government sought support from the IMF last year.

Libyan telecommunications company LAP GreenN is considering chasing after Zambia’s offshore assets after the southern African country defaulted four times on an order to pay $257 million in compensation for nationalizing a firm it invested in, Bloomberg News reported. Zambia owes state-owned LAP GreenN more than $400 million including interest, and has defaulted on payments totaling about $220 million following a 2016 judgment in the nation’s high court, according to the Libyan Post, Telecommunication and IT Holding Co. which owns LAP GreenN. Yields on the nation’s dollar bonds climbed.

Sub-Saharan Africa is slipping into a new debt crisis, with 40 per cent of the region’s countries now at high risk of debt distress — double the proportion of five years ago, the Financial Times reported. With the number of countries already unable to service their debts doubling in the past year to eight, officials at the IMF are urging all African countries to raise taxes to provide more scope for paying interest, which has increased to levels last experienced at the start of the century.

The Republic of Congo’s plan to restructure its debt won’t affect holders of its Eurobonds, Prime Minister Clement Mouamba said. Yields on the notes fell for the first time in four days, Bloomberg News reported. The oil-producing central African nation owes creditors at least $9.14 billion and sought support from the International Monetary Fund last year. A three-year program to help stabilize the country’s “unsustainable external debt” is expected to be agreed soon, Mouamba said in a statement emailed from the capital, Brazzaville.

The aftershocks of the 2016 crisis that hit pan-African mortgage lender Shelter Afrique seem to be still being felt two years on. The bank has gone to creditors to have its short-term debt restructured, attributing the crisis to loss confidence that saw lenders abandon the mortgage firm, The Standard reported. This was after former Head of Finance Godfrey Waweru blew the lid on accounting and lending irregularities at the mortgage lender.

China and India extended the grace periods granted to Mozambique for repayment of more than $2.2 billion of debt, the southern African nation’s Finance Ministry said. The two countries agreed to the extensions in talks last year, Stelia Neta, deputy national director of the ministry, said in an emailed response to questions. In addition, China agreed to forgive $34 million of debt, she said. The restructuring agreements with China and India were first announced by Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosario last month.

The International Monetary Fund said it was resuming loan disbursements to Chad after the Central African oil producer reached an agreement in principal to restructure its more than $1 billion debt to Glencore and four banks, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Glencore and the banks lent Chad's state oil firm about $1.45 billion in 2014 to be repaid with crude oil cargoes but global oil prices crashed shortly thereafter.

The true size of Zambia’s debt is “debatable” because the country has contracted more loans than official external debt numbers show, Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts said. While the nation signed up for $5.3 billion in debt from 2015 to 2016 and the lender estimates it contracted another $4.4 billion last year, official external debt only grew $1 billion over the period, analysts Rukayat Yusuf and Andrew Macfarlane said in an emailed note on Thursday, Bloomberg News reported.