Credit insurers have decided to withdraw insurance cover for South African retailer Steinhoff International's loans, Steinhoff's Austrian subsidiary Kika/Leiner said on Monday. "The loss of the credit insurance is a result of the Steinhoff crisis," Kika/Leiner said in a statement. Steinhoff, whose retail chains include Britain's Poundland, Mattress Firm in the U.S. and Conforama in France, has been fighting to recover from the fallout from accounting irregularities discovered in December, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

A Botswana court has overturned last month’s High Court decision to take Tati Nickel Mine out of provisional liquidation because the earlier ruling did not consider the impact on creditors, Reuters reported. Tati, a subsidiary of the liquidated BCL mine group, has been under provisional liquidation since October 2016. The liquidation was extended twice after liquidator Nigel Dixon-Warren requested more time to pursue a deal with investors. The High Court took the company out of liquidation in April following the lapse of the last extension.

Lawyers for jailed Congo Republic opposition figure Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to make his release a condition for the approval of a bailout for the debt-crippled nation, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Like other Central African oil producing countries, Congo has been hit by low crude prices. Several neighbors, including Chad and Gabon, have already secured bailouts from the IMF.

The UK is teaming up with Standard Chartered Bank to lend $100m to Zimbabwean companies in what will be the British government’s first direct commercial loan to the southern African nation’s private sector in more than 20 years, the Financial Times reported. The loan is the biggest sign of a thaw in the UK-Zimbabwe relationship since London imposed sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s regime in the early 2000s. The rapprochement follows Mr Mugabe’s forced resignation in November in a “soft coup” that ended his 37-year rule.

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.

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.

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.