Africa Loans

Emerging markets-focused mining firm Trevali Mining has amended and extending an existing loan facility, bringing its revolving credit facility up to $275m.

Ghana Cocoa Board (Cocobod) signed its $1.3bn trade finance facility of Thursday, as the company prepares to start funding purchases for the coming harvest.

More supranational banks will use synthetic securitization and other risk transfer techniques, specialists believe, after the African Development Bank’s trailblazing $1bn deal, revealed this week, writes Jon Hay.

The UK’s Gemcorp has given a $250m loan to the Zimbabwe sovereign to help the country buy essential goods, as low dollar liquidity puts the squeeze on importers.

African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) has for the first time turned exclusively to the Korean banking market to sign a $150m club loan.

The African Development Bank’s $1bn synthetic securitization is not its first risk transfer transaction, and will not be its last. The bank has marked itself out as a leader in this sphere, though the effort to get such techniques to work is also highly collaborative.

The European Commission has unveiled a portfolio of financial guarantee transactions it is doing to support development in Africa and regions bordering the EU. Among them are two programmes conducted by the African Development Bank, including its new synthetic securitisation.

The African Development Bank has become the first supranational bank to use a securitization sold to private investors to free up balance sheet capacity. The deal, four years in the making, demonstrates a new technique that could expand development banks’ firepower to promote development.

Egypt’s Oilex has signed a E£2.4bn ($134m) loan from regional lenders, as the country continues to draw in international financing after a stamp of approval from the IMF.

South Africa’s Democratic Alliance (DA) has sent a freedom of information (FOI) request for full terms of a $2.5bn-equivalent loan from China to utility Eskom, with the official opposition party fearing a potential loss of ownership of the company to its Asian creditors.

Lenders have been “very significantly” scaled back in a $1bn loan for Egyptian General Petroleum Corp (EGPC), as demand for the pre-export finance deal far surpassed the cross-border trade linked to the loan’s structure.

The UK has announced an up to £750m export credit line to Nigeria, at a time when loans bankers say that sub-Saharan Africa names are tricky to finance.