Finance

NEW YORK (Capital Markets in Africa) — President Joe Biden is poised to unveil a plan that would raise taxes on the income, investments and estates of the wealthiest Americans to levels not seen in more than four decades, a move that will trigger intense debate in Congress about whether and how to address income inequality. Biden’s “American Families Plan,” itself featuring the biggest expansion of federal support for lower-income and middle-class Americans in decades,…

ADDIS ABABA (Capital Markets in Africa) — MTN Group Ltd. and a consortium led by Vodafone Group Plchave bid for telecommunications licenses in Ethiopia, as wireless service providers look to tap the last remaining large market in the world. Ethiopia will take a few days to review the technical offer and then open the financial bids, said Brook Taye, an adviser in the Finance Ministry. Earlier on Monday, Kenya’s largest telecommunications provider Safaricom Plcsaid it was…

CAIRO (Capital Markets in Africa) — Egypt said it hopes to soon end a dispute over compensation regarding the huge container vessel that blocked the Suez Canal last month. The Suez Canal Authority, which claimed $916 million in damages from the Ever Given’s owners, is “eager” to reach a settlement amenable to all parties, Chairman Osama Rabie said in a statement. The 400-meter-long vessel, owned by Japan’s Shoei Kisen Kaisha Ltd., blocked the vital waterway for six…

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) — The U.K. estimated that delivering on its ambitious targets to slash greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century will cost 651 billion pounds ($904 billion), but the benefits of protecting the environment will be far greater. The government’s official impact assessment of a target to cut emissions by 78% by 2035 indicates that action will generate a boost to the economy of about 918 billion pounds. That’s…

NEW YORK (Capital Markets in Africa) — President Joe Biden wants to end the preferential U.S. tax treatment of investment income that has benefited the nation’s wealthy as he seeks to fund a sweeping new social-spending program. But he will need to overcome a major political hurdle in Congress to do so. The White House plans to propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for those earning $1 million or more, to 39.6%, according…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — Like clockwork through the 1990s, Sufian Beker trekked to Paris to plead for cuts in Ethiopia’s soaring debt. As the war-torn country’s finance minister from 1996 to 2015, Beker had few options other than what’s known as the Paris Club, an informal group of wealthy nations that has bailed out governments from Argentina to Zambia. In 2004 he found himself again in the monumental French Treasury building towering over…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — Christopher Giancarlo, the former chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission who’s known as “Crypto Dad” for his early embrace of digital assets, joined the board of cryptocurrency lender BlockFi. Giancarlo, 61, headed the CFTC when the Chicago Board Options Exchange and CME Group Inc. first offered Bitcoin futures contracts. He gained tens of thousands of followers on Twitter after his February 2018 congressional testimony in which he advocated…