Steinhoff International Holdings NV may soon release a revised proposal to resolve more than $8 billion of legal claims against the retailer after a previous deal recently fell through, Bloomberg News reported. The company “is considering its options” after a South African court ruled on July 2 that the deal related to debt refinancing was void. Steinhoff still believes that “a global settlement is in the interest of all parties,” and will “strive to achieve one,” a spokesman said on Wednesday. This is expected to include a revised offer to be made shortly.
Read more
Resources Per Country
- Angola
- Benin
- Botswana
- Burkina Faso
- Cameroon
- Central African Republic
- Chad
- Congo
- Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo)
- Cote d'Ivoire
- Djibouti
- Equatorial Guinea
- Eritrea
- Ethiopia
- Gabon
- Ghana
- Guinea
- Kenya
- Liberia
- Madagascar
- Mauritania
- Mauritius
- Mozambique
- Namibia
- Niger
- Nigeria
- Rwanda
- Senegal
- Seychelles
- Sierra Leone
- Somalia
- South Africa
- Sudan
- Tanzania
- Uganda
- Zambia
- Zimbabwe
Four African finance ministers urged the Group of 20 nations to pressure the International Monetary Fund to accelerate the disbursement of new loans the continent needs to overcome the economic devastation wrought by the coronavirus pandemic and avert an insolvency crisis, Bloomberg News reported.
Read more
Ethiopia plans to restructure an additional $1 billion of debt as the government seeks to free up funds to support its economic recovery, Bloomberg News reported. Restructuring of the debt will provide a grace period of as long as six years and extend the maturity by 10 years, the Finance Ministry said in a report on its website. “$2.5 billion in principal and interest payment has been postponed for five years by commercial creditors under the first external debt restructuring scheme,” according to the report.
Read more
Global M&A activity broke records for a second consecutive quarter this year as companies continued to borrow cheaply and spend their cash reserves on transformative deals to reposition themselves for the post-COVID world, Reuters reported. Deals worth $1.5 trillion were announced in the three months to June 30, more than any second quarter on record and up 13% from the record first quarter of the year despite activity among blank-check firms slowed down.
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund announced that Sudan has met the initial criteria for over $50 billion in foreign debt relief, another step for the East African nation to rejoin the international community after nearly three decades of isolation, the Associated Press reported. The two international financial institutions said in a joint statement on Tuesday that Sudan “has taken the necessary steps to begin receiving debt relief,” which amounts to over 90% of the nation’s total external debt.
Read more
Namibian President Hage Geingob on Tuesday appointed an 11-member Business Rescue Task Force to review business and insolvency legislation with the aim of rescuing businesses in financial distress, Reuters reported. The Southern African nation, whose mining and tourism dependent economy has been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, is in the midst of a deadly third wave of infections that is threatening to take more businesses under.
Read more
The Cajee brothers, who ran a cryptocurrency investment platform from South Africa that the local regulator suspects of being a Ponzi scheme, are confounding both their family and desperate investors alike, Bloomberg News reported. It’s still hard to establish the whereabouts of Ameer and Raees Cajee, the pair that operated Johannesburg-based Africrypt since 2019. They appear to have vanished, along with an estimated $3.6 billion in Bitcoin -- an amount that a lawyer for the brothers said was inflated.
Read more
The International Monetary Fund will release $407 million in new funding for Kenya’s government, citing the nation’s dedication to economic overhauls, Bloomberg News reported. The Kenyan authorities have shown strong commitment amid challenging circumstances and are acting to reduce debt vulnerabilities while maintaining support for the economic recovery, the IMF said in a statement after the executive board completed a review of its loan programs.
Kenya expects a review of an International Monetary Fund program to be concluded successfully, in order to allow the release of $410 million in new funding for the government, Bloomberg News reported. “We expect the review to be successful given the progress we have made towards the goals we had set for ourselves under the programme,” Kenya’s National Treasury Secretary Ukur Yatani said in a statement on Twitter on Wednesday. The government plans to narrow its budget deficit for the year starting July 1 to 7.5% of gross domestic product from an estimate of 8.6% in the current period.
Read more
A group of creditors that bought Etihad Airways PJSC-linked bonds are preparing to auction $463 million of claims against insolvent airlines Alitalia and Air Berlin to recover some of their investment, Bloomberg News reported. The trustee of bonds issued by EA Partners I and II -- two special purpose entities set up by the Abu Dhabi-based carrier -- hired Barclays Bank Plc to arrange the sale, according to a statement. Potential buyers will be able to access documentation on June 21 and the auction will take place within two weeks, it said.
Read more