Africa

The oil boom that turned this Atlantic coast city into the world’s most expensive for foreigners has gone bust, threatening President José Eduardo dos Santos’s long grip on power in Africa’s second-biggest crude producer, The Wall Street Journal reported. Property prices have plummeted by half and Western oil companies are laying off thousands; U.S. dollars and steady work have become scarce. Angola’s troubles threaten to reverberate as far away as Beijing, the regime’s sponsor and top crude customer.

The receiver for Kenya's privately owned Imperial Bank (IBL) found substantial fraud but the bank is still viable and shareholders are considering a proposal to inject capital, the central bank said on Tuesday. Imperial Bank was put into receivership this month after the board alerted the central bank to malpractices at the mid-sized lender, rattling the financial community.

South Africa's Evraz Highveld Steel and Vanadium will defend its business rescue proceedings in court against British parent Evraz , the company said in a statement on Friday. The South African steelmaker, seeking protection from creditors after heavy losses due to cheap imports from China, said East Metals AG and Mastercroft S.A.R.L had instituted court proceedings to have a vote by creditors earlier this month declared invalid. Both are subsidiaries of the London-listed parent company, which acquired the South African steelmaker in 2008.

Kenya's central bank on Wednesday said it was ready to provide "adequate liquidity" to the country's banking system after a mid-sized lender was put into receivership a day earlier and hit banking shares on the stock market, Reuters reported. A government agency took control of privately-held Imperial Bank on Tuesday after the central bank said it had become aware of "unsafe or unsound business conditions". Another smaller bank was put in receivership in August after liquidity problems.

Credit Suisse Group AG Chief Executive Tidjane Thiam says it is “madness” for African nations to rely on loans in foreign currencies to fund vital infrastructure including roads, power and clean water, The Wall Street Journal reported. Lenders in African nations must instead find domestic savings to invest in local projects, said the Ivory Coast-born banker who took charge of Zurich-based Credit Suisse in June. Mr.

As if being kicked out of one of the world’s biggest emerging-market bond indexes isn’t enough, Nigeria now faces the risk of its credit rating falling further into junk, Bloomberg News reported today. Standard & Poor’s, which rates Africa’s largest oil producer four levels below investment grade at B+ with a stable outlook, releases a review of its assessment on Sept. 18. A week later, it’s the turn of Fitch Ratings, which has Nigeria at BB-, one level above S&P, with a negative outlook.

South Africa’s central bank governor has given warning about emerging market turbulence if volatility over the Chinese economy continues, but has ruled out any intervention to prop up a weak rand. The South African Reserve Bank (Sarb) surprised analysts on Monday when it released a statement on currency volatility, saying it “may consider becoming involved in foreign exchange markets to ensure orderly market conditions”.

Bad news from China has sparked a firestorm in the developing countries that feed its vast industrial machine, leaving a swath of economies with few good ways to escape a crunch, The Wall Street Journal reported. In Indonesia, coal once bound for China is piled up in port. In South Africa, mines that fed China’s voracious demand for metals are firing workers. In financial markets, investors have responded by pulling out. On Monday, the currencies of Russia, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil and other commodity exporters tumbled to multiyear lows against the U.S. dollar.

The shock waves from China’s surprise yuan devaluation are ricocheting through African economies, sending currencies tumbling and stoking anxiety that the continent’s biggest trading partner might be losing its appetite for everything from oil to wine, The Wall Street Journal reported. In South Africa, the rand hit a 14-year low of 12.94 to the dollar on Monday, extending a 2% drop since Aug. 10 and a 12% slide this year.

The Nigerian government has resorted to chopping down trees lining the streets of its capital to thwart black market money changers, one of a range of unorthodox measures it is deploying to defend its weakening currency, the Financial Times reported. On an August morning in Abuja, a labourer who said he was hired by the city government cut branches from a towering tree with a chainsaw. Nearby other workers hacked away at smaller trees with machetes.