JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – The retail price of petrol in South Africa will increase by nearly 1 percent from May 4, while the price of wholesale diesel will largely remain steady, the energy department said on Monday.
The price of petrol will increase by 12 cents to 12.74 rand per litre in the commercial hub of Gauteng province, while diesel will go down by 1 cents to 10.52 rand per litre, the department said in a statement.
(Reporting by Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo; Editing by Alison Williams)
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa’s trade balance swung to a 2.92 billion rand ($206.10 million) surplus in March from a revised 1.27 billion rand deficit in February, the national revenue agency said on Friday.
Exports were up by 6.3 percent to 96.13 billion rand on a month-on-month basis, while imports rose by 1.6 percent to 93.22 billion rand on a month-on-month basis, the South African Revenue Service said in a statement.
($1 = 14.1678 rand)
(Reporting by Mfuneko Toyana; Editing by James Macharia)
TUNIS (Reuters) – Tunisia’s central bank kept its key interest rate unchanged at 4.25 percent, the spokesman of bank said on Friday.
The bank last cut its main interest rate in October, from 4.75 percent, in a bid to boost economic growth as inflation fell. Inflation was 4.9 percent in 2015, down from 5.5 percent in 2014.
(Reporting By Tarek Amara; editing by Patrick Markey)
LAGOS (Reuters) – Lafarge Africa is in the middle of a roadshow to market a 60 billion naira ($302 million) bond programme to refinance loans at United Company of Nigeria (UNICEM), which it acquired last year, its finance chief said on Thursday.
“We are in the process of restructuring the UNICEM debt. We are in the middle of a roadshow,” Lafarge Africa Chief Finance Officer Anders Kristiansson told an analysts call.
“We want to refinance the U.S. dollar borrowings that we have in UNICEM.”
($1 = 198.55 naira)
(Reporting by Chijioke Ohuocha; Editing by Alexander Smith)
CAIRO (Reuters) – Egypt’s Commercial International Bank (CIB) approved a two-week extension for an offer by Beltone Financial to acquire its subsidiary CI Capital, CI Capital’s Chief Executive Officer Mahmoud Atalla told Reuters.
The offer was due to expire on Thursday.
“CIB approved Beltone’s request to extend the period of the offer to acquire CI Capital by two weeks, ending on May 12,” Atalla said.
In February, CIB signed a deal to sell investment bank CI Capital to Beltone, a unit of billionaire Naguib Sawiris’ Orascom Telecom OTMT.CA, for 924 million Egyptian pounds ($104 million) but the deal has stalled pending approval from Egyptian regulators.
Sawiris said at the time he planned to merge CI Capital with Beltone Financial, which OTMT bought last year, to create one of Egypt’s largest investment firms, but the deal has faced a series of delays.
The Egyptian Financial Supervisory Authority said this month that the deal was delayed pending the resolution of a court case and other issues, including a violation by Sawiris of pre-existing pledges to the EFSA.
Sawiris’s bid for CI Capital was also challenged in February when a unit of the state-owned National Bank of Egypt made a counter-offer. It later withdrew.
Sawiris later said the deal was being held up by national security concerns and criticised the state for meddling in business, adding that it discouraged investors.
(Reporting by Ehab Farouk; Writing by Asma Alsharif; Editing by Susan Fenton and Ed Osmond)
LUANDA (Reuters) – Angola has opened an investigation into the conduct of the management at the local unit of failed Portuguese bank Banco Espirito Santo, Attorney General Joao Maria de Sousa said on Wednesday.
Banco Espirito Santo (BES) collapsed in 2014 under the weight of its founding family’s debts and exposure to bad loans in Angola.
Portugal’s Novo Banco was carved out as the “good bank” from BES, while its Angolan unit Banco Espirito Santo Angola (BESA) was reincarnated as Banco Economico, with new shareholders including state oil company Sonangol.
“We have opened an inquiry on Banco Espirito Santo Angola management. This inquiry was an initiative of the bank shareholders,” de Sousa told reporters.
“I can not talk about the possibility of arrests in this process because I don’t know the facts.”
(Reporting by Herculano Coroado, Writing by Stella Mapenzauswa, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
MAPUTO (Reuters) – Mozambique provided guarantees on loans to state firms Proindicus and Mozambique Asset Management to protect strategic national infrastructure and help maintain naval equipment, a government spokesman said.
The spokesman’s comment, in a statement, followed disclosure by the International Monetary Fund last week that Mozambique had admitted to having more than $1 billion of undisclosed debt and that the two parties were evaluating the implications of the disclosure.
Earlier, a source at the Fund had told Reuters that Proindicus, owned by the interior and defence ministries and the state security services, had been lent $504 million by Credit Suisse and $118 million by Russia’s VTB.
Another loan of $535 million had gone to Mozambique Asset Management, another state company set up to build a shipyard in the northern city of Pemba, that source said.
In his statement dated Tuesday but acquired by Reuters on Wednesday, spokesman Mouzinho Saide said the government had granted a $622 million loan guarantee to Proindicus in 2013, and $535 million to Mozambique Asset Management the following year.
“We faced security threats, such as piracy … illegal immigration, drug trafficking … and illegal fishing,” Saide said after a meeting of Mozambique’s cabinet.
He said the government had also been keen to ensure protection of the assets of oil and gas companies operating in Mozambique’s exclusive economic zone.
The loans are in addition to an $850 million ‘tuna bond’ issued in 2013 and restructured last month because the southeast African nation was struggling to meet repayments.
The IMF source said the extra borrowing had pushed Mozambique’s foreign debt to $9.64 billion, a level “very close to unsustainability”.
(Reporting by Manuel Mucari; Writing by Stella Mapenzauswa; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
ABUJA (Reuters) – The World Bank held talks with the Nigerian president on Wednesday on how it could help Nigeria overcome an economic crisis caused mainly by a sharp fall in crude prices eating into its oil revenues.
On her second day of meetings with Nigerian officials, World Bank Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer Sri Mulyani Indrawati met President Muhammadu Buhari, who plans to stimulate the flagging economy with a record 6 trillion naira ($31 billion) budget.
Nigeria will have to borrow 1.8 trillion naira from abroad and at home to help fund the budget, which has been delayed by several months and wrangling with parliament, if it goes ahead.
Although Nigeria has held talks with the World Bank over a possible loan or credit facility in recent months, Indrawati did not address this when speaking to reporters after the meeting.
“We would like to know how we can help Nigeria to make the very important decisions, whether on micro economic policy and other sectoral policy, that will make this economy move forward to become a strong middle income country,” she said.
Indrawati, who met Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun on Tuesday, said she and Buhari discussed the government’s “commendable goals to improve tax collection and crackdown on corruption.
Nigeria’s economy, the largest in Africa, grew by 2.8 percent last year, its slowest pace since 1999.
(By Felix Onuah. Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
By Lawrence White
LONDON (Reuters) – Atlas Mara, the African investment vehicle of former Barclays boss Bob Diamond, has held discussions with investors with a view to making a bid for Barclays’ African business, it said on Tuesday.
Atlas said such an acquisition would help it accelerate its strategy to build a major financial firm across sub-Saharan Africa and that it had already lined up funding for an offer, without elaborating on what form the financing would take.
“The consortium has committed, long-term strategic investors, the funding is in place,” Diamond said on a conference call.
Atlas Mara’s equity at the end of 2015 was $625 million, while Barclays Africa has a market value of $8.47 billion, causing some analysts to question whether they can muster the financial fire power to make a serious offer.
“I am very skeptical that they can pull it off quite frankly,” said Zoran Milojevic, a director at Auerbach Grayson, a New York brokerage specialising in emerging and frontier markets.
“However, if this were to happen, they would certainly jump a lot of hurdles, and join the proper playing field in African banking.”
Private equity group Carlyle is one member of the consortium, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters this week following media reports of the U.S. fund’s interest.
Barclays said this year it would sell down its 62 percent stake in Barclays Africa to focus on other divisions. While its business is mainly in South Africa, it has operations in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique and Seychelles.
Atlas said there was no certainty a transaction would be completed but if discussions with investors resulted in more substantive negotiations with Barclays, Diamond and co-founder Ashish J. Thakkar would recuse themselves from the talks.
Shares in Barclays Africa rose 1.2 percent by 1445 GMT while shares in Atlas Mara were up 4.9 percent, but remain down 18 percent so far this year amid a dim outlook for African banking.
“We share your pain, our money is where our mouth is,” Diamond told investors on Tuesday in reference to his and other senior executives’ investments in Atlas’s declining shares.
Founded in 2013, Atlas made four acquisitions in 2014 and now has operations in Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Tanzania and Nigeria.
But some of those countries have felt the brunt of the global slump in commodity prices, which has sapped government budgets and caused the likes of Zambia and Mozambique to turn to the International Monetary Fund for support. [nL5N17H32A]
Atlas Mara earlier on Tuesday reported profit before tax of $19.2 million for 2015, compared with a pretax loss of $58 million in 2014.
(Additional reporting by Andrew MacAskill and Karin Strohecker; editing by Sinead Cruise and David Clarke)
ACCRA (Reuters) – New Bank of Ghana’s Governor Abdul-Nashiru Issahaku said in his first domestic speech on Tuesday that bringing down inflation and reducing interest rates were his main priorities but that achieving those goals would take some time.
The Bank also remains committed to enabling commercial banks to scale up lending to small and medium sized businesses and other sectors in order to boost gross domestic product growth, Issahaku said.
(Reporting by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; Editing by Joe Bavier)
