Finance

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — MTN Group Ltd. plans to exit the Middle East as Africa’s biggest wireless carrier changes focus to its home continent. The Middle East “environment is becoming increasingly complex and it contributes less to the group’s earnings,” Chief Executive Officer Rob Shuter said on a call with reporters Thursday. The disposals will be done in a phased manner, with its three consolidated subsidiaries in Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria earmarked to be sold…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — Many small, vulnerable states are missing out on debt relief and financial support to help weather damage from the coronavirus pandemic because of outdated eligibility criteria, Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland said, calling for an “urgent” moratorium on external debt repayments for all developing countries. The rules to qualify for support from bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and for the Group of 20’s debt suspension initiative are based…

NEW YORK(Capital Markets in Africa) — The world’s major central banks aren’t purchasing debt fast enough, leaving almost $1 trillion of new sovereign bonds looking for buyers in the months ahead. The flood of fresh debt, sold by governments to fund pandemic-rescue packages, threatens to dwarf central-bank buying and swamp markets in the U.K., Canada and Australia, according to Bloomberg calculations. Policy-maker purchases will also lag issuance in the U.S. and Japan, where a continuing…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) — The big deals that Prosus NV should be winning is slipping through its fingers. Late last year, Takeaway.com NV trumped Prosus’s bid for Just Eat Plc. Now EBay Inc.’s classifieds business is being scooped up by Prosus’s smaller Norwegian rival, Adevinta ASA, for $9.2 billion. It’s not a great start for a company set up to be a deal machine. Prosus was spun off from South African tech company Naspers Ltd. in September with a…

JOHANNESBURG (Bloomberg) — The Foschini Group Ltd. agreed to buy fellow South African clothing retailer Jet for 480 million rand ($28.7 million), the second deal agreed by administrators in charge of salvaging Edcon Holdings Ltd. from bankruptcy proceedings. TFG will acquire the Jet brand alongside at least 371 stores and stock valued at about 800 million rand, the Cape Town-based company said in a statement on Monday. Employees and some senior management will be retained alongside a…

SOUTH AFRICA (Capital Markets in Africa) — The South African Reserve Bank is powerless when it comes to alleviating debt-service costs for the poorest 80% of the country’s people, researchers at the Pretoria-based central bank concluded. Reductions in the repurchase rate generally lead to lower borrowing costs for the richest 20%, but they’re negatively correlated with lending rates for the rest, economists Kerschyl Singh and David Fowkes wrote in a research paper published on the…

ACCRA (Capital Markets in Africa) — Ghana’s budget deficit for 2020 will swell to more than double the legal limit because of the impact of the coronavirus on the economy, undoing years of fiscal consolidation that was supposed to mark the end of persistent financial bailouts. The fiscal gap is forecast to widen beyond 10% of gross domestic product from an adjusted outlook in March of 7.8% of GDP, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta said in…