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.

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 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.

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.

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.