Africa

Botswana’s High Court has taken Tati Nickel Mine out of provisional liquidation, dismissing a request for more time to negotiate with potential buyers, the liquidator said on Wednesday. Tati — a subsidiary of the liquidated BCL mine group — has since October 2016 been under provisional liquidation, which was twice extended after liquidator Nigel Dixon-Warren asked for more time to pursue a deal with investors, Reuters reported. The High Court took the company out of liquidation on Tuesday following the lapse of the last extension.

Investors fretting that Zambia may have more debt than it’s let on have sent the nation’s Eurobonds tumbling, Bloomberg News reported. Yields on the copper-producing country’s $1.25 billion amortizing bonds due in 2027 rose as much as 54 basis points, the most since February 2016, before paring the increase to 50 basis points by 4:35 p.m. in London. At 8.45 percent, the yield was the highest in more than a year. Banks including Nomura Holdings Inc. say the government may have greater external liabilities than it’s made public.

Zambia is facing tough questions over its foreign-debt levels from investors who think the real number may be more than double what the government says it is, Bloomberg News reported. Lenders including Nomura Holdings Inc. believe the state hasn’t come completely clean on how much external borrowing it’s undertaken. This is raising concern the southern African nation may be headed for a similar situation to neighboring Mozambique, where hidden debts led to default and the government is seeking to restructure.

The former Angolan president’s son and a former central banker are suspected of using accounts at HSBC Holdings PLC and Standard Chartered PLC in an attempt to defraud the country’s central bank by transferring $500 million through these U.K.-based lenders, people familiar with the matter said. The prosecutor’s office in Angola said the money was transferred from Angola’s central bank, allegedly to guarantee a $30 billion financing deal, according to a statement posted on the government website Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported.

South Africa's new president Cyril Ramaphosa will need to call on all his dealmaking skills to overhaul ailing state-owned firms and tackle land reform if he wants to capitalize on Moody's decision not to downgrade the country's debt to junk, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Moody's said its decision to keep South Africa's rating at investment grade reflected its view the country's institutions would regain strength under more transparent and predictable policies - though the new government had to stay on track.

Mozambique is set to meet foreign creditors to discuss almost $2 billion of debt in London Tuesday in what will mark the start of formal restructuring negotiations, more than a year after the southern African nation defaulted, Bloomberg News reported. Investors including Credit Suisse Group AG and UBS Group AG have little idea what will be discussed. Mozambique first missed coupon payments on its $727 million Eurobond due 2023 in January last year and has had almost no contact with the holders since then.

Ghana’s central bank has appointed accounting firm KPMG as administrator for Unibank to save it from imminent collapse, Governor Ernest Addison said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The move, which follows central bank liquidations of two other local banks last year, will prevent losses to depositors and other creditors and ensure it does not create further risks to the wider financial system, Addison told reporters. Ghanaian-owned Unibank had suffered persistent cash shortfalls and regularly fell below cash reserve requirements, he said.

Mozambique will meet its commercial creditors on Tuesday in London to present proposals on how to restructure its huge debts, but Eurobond holders and analysts expressed little confidence on how much progress can be made, Nasdaq.com reported. Shortly after restructuring a Eurobond in 2016, Mozambique's government admitted to $1.4 billion of previously undisclosed loans, much of which was spent on building a state tuna-fishing company and enhancing maritime security.

Extensive changes are in the offing at South Africa’s troubled state-owned companies as new Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan moves to tackle their many management and financial failings, Bloomberg News reported. Power utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. and several other state entities have been caught up in graft and management scandals over recent years and repeatedly called on the state to bail them out as their debt ballooned to unsustainable levels.

The confluence of shocks that has hit African countries in recent years has led to a strong increase in the number of International Monetary Fund bailouts in the region, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. The total agreed amount of the IMF’s outstanding programmes with Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries rose nearly fivefold between end-2014 and end-2017 from $1.8bn to $7.2bn.