Africa

Evraz Highveld Steel and Vanadium has a "reasonable prospect" of recovering despite closing operations and possibly cutting jobs, the South African steelmaker's business rescue team said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The company, which last week pulled the plug on its South African iron operations, citing a lack of working capital and saying at the time it planned to stop its steel plant, has been in business rescue proceedings for three months to protect it from creditors.

The collapse in commodity prices and the rise of the African middle class has flipped the fortune trends of the continent's richest people. "The go-go years of African billionaires whose wealth has been built around oil is over," said Martyn Davies, CEO of Johannesburg, South Africa-based investment research firm, Frontier Advisory. "We have placed far too much emphasis on a handful of people making significant capital through distorted-priced resources.

Zambia is planning its largest sale of debt as the copper-rich country seeks to plug a yawning gap in government finances, the Financial Times reported. The southern African nation is planning to raise over $1bn this week and is expected to pay a higher rate than it has for previous issues as investors adopt a more cautious approach to buying emerging and frontier market debt.

Ghana’s president has blamed the country’s economic malaise on government overspending just as the bottom fell out of the market for its main commodity exports, the Financial Times reported. In a reversal of fortunes that provides a cautionary tale for other natural resource-dependent emerging nations, John Mahama said “wage overruns” — a reference to public sector salaries that accounted for 72 per cent of government expenditure in 2012 — and huge energy subsidy bills fuelled the fiscal deficits that crippled Ghana’s economy.

Some of the best-paid people in this country—its lawmakers—are proposing an unusual measure: docking their own salaries, The Wall Street Journal reported. The volunteered pay cut is part of a new austerity descending on Africa’s top economy. Nigeria’s government makes most of its money from oil revenue, which has shrunk along with global energy prices. President Muhammadu Buhari came to office in May pledging to root out extravagant spending by a government that has grown accustomed to unchecked oil wealth.

Businesses avoid paying $200 billion annually in taxes by channeling their overseas’ investments through offshore financial hubs, a United Nations agency said Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. The estimate by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development is one of the first attempts by an international governmental organization to put a figure on tax avoidance by companies that record their profits in countries with low tax rates, regardless of where those profits are actually earned.

Uchumi Supermarkets Ltd., Kenya’s only publicly traded retailer, fired two top executives amid a forensic audit and announced plans to hire a management consultancy to review its business strategy. The stock slumped. Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Ciano and Chief Financial Officer Chadwick Okumu were relieved of their duties, while Human Resources Manager Michael Kibe was suspended, Chairwoman Khadija Mire told reporters Monday in the capital, Nairobi.

South Sudan is running out of money, which along with a civil war and mass food shortages is putting the world’s youngest country at risk of becoming its youngest failed state, The Wall Street Journal reported. In the past two years, the U.S. government has spent more than $1 billion to try to help stave off escalating violence in South Sudan, government figures show. Other Western countries have also given massive amounts.

Proposed new obligations on multinationals to produce country-by-country reports on their financial affairs will have a “massive impact” on them, a leading member of the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation has said, the Irish Times reported. Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the Center for Tax Policy and Administration at the OECD, was reacting to what he said were “angry responses” to the organisation’s latest proposals on the topic.

Failed unsecured lender African Bank (Abil) has offered R1.65bn to junior creditors in a restructuring plan agreed on Thursday that may please some investors who had not expected to get anything back, Business Day reported. Abil collapsed under a mountain of bad debt in August last year, forcing the government to appoint external administrators to oversee a restructuring that includes carving out a "good bank" using its healthy assets worth R26bn. Junior creditors, which rank behind other creditors when a company or bank fails, had claims on Abil totalling R4.4bn, the bank said.