JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa’s MTN has increased its investment in an Iranian e-commerce business, it said on Monday, without disclosing the size of the transaction.

MTN, Africa’s largest mobile phone company, told Reuters last year that it planned to expand in Iran, where it has a leading position but from which it has not been able to repatriate profits until recently due to U.S. sanctions.

MTN said its Iranian unit Irancell led a funding round for the Iran Internet Group (IIG) to accelerate the e-commerce group’s growth.

IIG runs Snapp.ir, a car-hailing platform which MTN last year backed with a $22 million investment, as well as online marketplace Bamilo.com and food-ordering service Zoodfood.com.

“Over the past two years we have seen incredible growth at IIG, and this investment by our local partner is testament to the strength of the group’s business model and management team”, MTN Chief Digital Officer Herman Singh said.

MTN, which set aside about $700 million in capital expenditure, part of it to revamp Iran’s network infrastructure, has said it is growing its extending its reach into the nation’s e-commerce rapidly particularly in retail and travel sectors.

(Reporting by TJ Strydom)

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LUSAKA (Reuters) – Zambia’s economic growth is seen rising to 4 percent in 2017 and 4.2 percent in 2018, the World Bank said on Monday, predicting a jump in copper prices and improved power supply.

“Zambia is on a slow economic recovery path,” the World Bank’s senior financial management specialist Srinivas Gurazada said at a meeting with mining firms.

The government has forecast that the economy would grow 3.4 percent this year from around 3 percent last year due to low copper prices, power shortages, inflation and a government cash crunch that restricted investment into new projects.

(Reporting by Chris Mfula; Editing by James Macharia)

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CAIRO (Reuters) – The Egyptian pound strengthened on Sunday, reaching a three month high, as importers’ demand for dollars at banks eased, bankers told Reuters on Sunday.

Banks were selling dollars at around 15.8 pounds per dollar on Sunday, stronger than Thursday’s rate of around 16 per dollar.

The central bank floated the currency and raised base interest rates by 3 percent in early November, encouraging the International Monetary Fund to agree a three-year $12 billion funding deal later that month.

“Importers have a pile up of goods. When the prices rose after the float, people’s purchasing power declined and sales in most (imported) goods slowed down and with it their demand for dollars to import more goods slowed as well,” one banker said.

Dollar inflows at banks have also increased as foreign investors, scared off by a revolution in 2011 that ushered in an era of instability, have begun to return, while dollar remittances from Egyptians living abroad have risen sharply.

Foreign investors, lured by high yields in Egyptian treasuries, entered the market in the past few weeks pushing yields lower.

(Reporting by Asma Alsharif; Editing by Mark Potter)

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ABUJA (Reuters) – Nigeria’s central bank has disbursed $2.83 billion to critical sectors of the economy in December and January, it said in a statement on Thursday, in an attempt to kickstart a struggling economy and alleviate a drought of foreign currency.

Nigeria’s economy is wallowing in its first recession in a quarter of a century, hamstrung in part by low exports of the crude oil on which the government depends for revenues and bringing in foreign currency.

That lack of dollars in particular has left businesses struggling to import overseas products they need. The situation has been exacerbated by a government-imposed exchange rate that critics say artificially keeps the naira around 40 percent stronger than it should be.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said it favoured the manufacturing, raw material and agriculture sectors when disbursing the dollars in December and January, hoping to create employment and spur wealth creation.

The raw materials sector received $609 million in December and $228 million in January. Manufacturing got $53 million in December and $71 million in January, the CBN statement said.

The central bank is determined to continue to ease the foreign exchange pressure on critical sectors, the statement cited Isaac Okorafor, acting director of the communications department, as saying.

Nigeria’s dollar reserves have risen 8.39 percent since the beginning of the year, mirroring a rise in global oil prices, but remain far from a peak of $64 billion in August 2008.

Nigeria’s naira hit a new low on the black market on Wednesday. That spurred the head of the bureau de change association to urge members to help stabilise the currency, the continued weakness of which has become a “major concern” for the central bank.

(Reporting by Camillus Eboh and Chijioke Ohuocha; Writing by Paul Carsten)

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JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma told parliament on Thursday the government would come down hard on the local banks accused in a report by the competition watchdog of rigging the rand currency.

“This matter is still under investigation… government is ready to act against market abuse, price fixing and collusion in the private sector in order to protect our country’s economy,” Zuma said in a speech.

(Reporting by Mfuneko Toyana; Editing by James Macharia)

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ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Europe’s largest hotel group AccorHotels, will open three hotels in Ethiopia by 2021, becoming the latest international chain to tap into the growing business and tourism sectors in the country.

Looking to counter subdued growth in Europe, AccorHotels and others have been expanding in emerging markets such as Ethiopia, where visitor numbers have been rising by more than 10 percent a year for the past decade, albeit from a very low base.

The Horn of Africa country is the continent’s second most populous nation and has one of its fastest-growing economies, propelled by huge spending on infrastructure, though it is still one of the poorest.

The new AccorHotels properties will offer more than 520 rooms in the capital, Addis Ababa, the company said in a statement released on Wednesday night.

Sheraton, Hilton, Radisson, Marriott and Golden Tulip are among a handful of hotel chains that operate in Ethiopia.

AccorHotels has been active in Africa for 40 years and is the continent’s leading hotelier by number of rooms. The group operates in 21 African countries, employing more than 10,000 people at 94 hotels.

(Reporting by Aaron Maasho; Editing by Katharine Houreld and David Goodman)

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ABUJA (Reuters) – Nigeria has not decided yet how much it wants to borrow from the World Bank, its budget minister said on Wednesday, to help pay for record spending of $24 billion this year.

Diplomats and officials told Reuters last week the oil producer plans to present the required economic reform proposals to the World Bank this month to borrow at least $1 billion.

“The figure will depend on the (2017) budget approved by the National Assembly,” Udoma Udo Udoma, minister for budget and national planning, told reporters when asked about the application.

“We are waiting for the passage of the budget by the National Assembly so that we will know the budget gap or the actual deficit before we can go to the World Bank for loan.”

Nigeria, which relies on oil revenue for most of its income, is struggling to drag itself out of its first recession for 25 years. It needs to plug a gap in its record 7.3 trillion naira 2017 budget aimed at stimulating the economy.

It had planned to apply for a World Bank loan last year but the process ground to a halt because it failed to submit its economic recovery plans by the end of December as initially promised, sources told Reuters last month.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has been holding back the second, $400 million, tranche of a $1 billion loan because it is also awaiting a reform plan from the government.

Nigeria will present its economic proposals to the AfDB at the same time as the World Bank, government officials said last week.

(Reporting by Felix Onuah; Writing by Ulf Laessing; Editing by Louise Ireland)

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ACCRA (Reuters) – The International Monetary Fund (IMF) may consider extending its three-year aid deal with Ghana if the new government requests an extension, the Washington-based lender said on Wednesday.

The West African country is more than halfway through a $918 million programme signed in April 2015 to restore fiscal balance to an economy dogged by deficits, high public debt and inflation.

The government of Nana Akufo-Addo, which took office in January promising to pursue fiscal discipline, is considering seeking an extension of the deal beyond April 2018 to December of that year, a senior official told Reuters on Tuesday. [nL5N1FV4Q1]

“The extension of the programme may be considered, if the authorities request it and if it is required to achieve the country’s economic objectives,” IMF Ghana chief Natalia Koliadin told Reuters.

The Fund said last week that Ghana urgently needs to narrow its budget deficit, estimated to have hit 9 percent of GDP as of the end of 2016 compared with a target of 5.25 percent.

The currency of the major commodities exporter on Wednesday fell to a record low of 4.4600 to the dollar, down 5.5 percent since January, according to Reuters data.

Finance Minister Kenneth Ofori Atta, who will present the government’s first budget to parliament in early March, said the budget will aim to restore financial discipline and expand the tax base.

In one positive sign, the statistics office said on Wednesday that annual consumer price inflation fell to 13.3 percent in January from 15.4 percent the previous month. [nL8N1G032V]

(Reporting by Kwasi Kpodo; Editing by Edward McAllister and Hugh Lawson)

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HARARE (Reuters) – Zimbabwean banks are holding $120 million in cash and double that in offshore accounts, the central bank said in a statement on Wednesday, as the country struggles with a persistent shortage of cash.

The southern African nation last year introduced a “bond note” currency to try to end the shortages, but businesses say they are instead facing serious delays in paying for imports because banks have no dollars to make the payments.

(Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe; editing by John Stonestreet)

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By Camillus Eboh

ABUJA (Reuters) – Oil majors Royal Dutch Shell and ENI have asked a Nigerian court to lift a temporary forfeiture of a long-disputed oilfield, a copy of the court documents filed by the two firms showed on Tuesday.

Last month, a Nigerian court ordered the temporary forfeiture of assets and the transfer of operations of the OPL 245 field owned by Shell and Eni, among others, to the federal government.

The Nigerian court case is the latest of several inquiries, including by Dutch and Italian authorities, into the 2011 purchase of the OPL 245 block which could hold up to 9.23 billion barrels of oil, according to industry figures.

In a court filing Shell said Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission had conducted “a gross abuse of process and an abuse of power” to get a court order asking for the forfeiture, the document obtained by Reuters said.

The commission “misrepresented material facts in obtaining the ex-parte order” and it was “in the interest of justice that the ex-parte order be discharged,” the document said.

The inquiry is investigating whether the $1.3 billion purchase of OPL 245 involved “acts of conspiracy, bribery, official corruption and money laundering,” according to court papers seen last month.

The Nigerian court will hear the case on Feb 27, judicial sources said.

The oil field’s licence was initially awarded in 1998 by former Nigerian oil minister Dan Etete to Malabu Oil and Gas, a company in which he held shares.

It was then sold for $1.3 billion in 2011 to Eni and Shell. According to documents from a British court, Malabu received $1.09 billion from the sale, while the rest went to the Nigerian government.

Earlier this month, Italy’s Eni backed CEO Claudio Descalzi after judicial sources said prosecutors had asked for him to be sent to trial over alleged corruption in Nigeria.

Italian prosecutors in December wrapped up a probe into the head of Eni, its former CEO, the company itself and Shell over alleged corruption surrounding the licence’s acquisition, sources told Reuters at the time.

(Reporting by Camilus Eboh; Additional reporting by Libby George in London; Writing by Ulf Laessing; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)

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