Finance

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) — An hour into his grilling on a video call with Parliament’s most senior interrogators, Prime Minister Boris Johnson broke into a fit of coughing. It was a brief reminder that he had been through worse times in recent weeks, surviving a severe bout of Covid-19 that had put him in intensive care. Yet the current row over claims that his closest aide flouted the government’s own lockdown orders may still…

LUSAKA (Capital Markets in Africa) — Zambia appointed Lazard Freres as financial adviser to help it restructure its external debt, the Finance Ministry said. The contract is worth $5 million and will last three years, the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. “The government has no intention of unilaterally restructuring debt without consulting creditors,” Treasury Secretary Fredson Yamba said in the statement. “We will respect agreements and diligently use market-based instruments in our debt…

ABIDJAN (Capital Markets in Africa) — The African Development Bank’s board decided the lender should order a new independent probe of its president, Akinwumi Adesina, after U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin rejected an internal investigation that cleared him of allegations of favoritism, according to two people familiar with the board’s deliberations on the matter. Africa’s largest multilateral lender agreed to the inquiry after several foreign governments backed the Treasury’s criticism of a bank-led examination into…

NEW YORK (Capital Markets in Africa) — U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to withdraw altogether from the World Health Organization, a move that would leave Chinese leader Xi Jinping as the most prominent voice leading the global fight against the pandemic. In a four-page letter detailing his grievances with the WHO, Trump called on the group to “demonstrate independence from China,” renewing a complaint that led him in April to temporarily suspend U.S. funding. He…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — The World Bank urged private creditors and the world’s poorest nations to accelerate debt relief talks to help mobilize resources to fight the coronavirus pandemic. The Group of 20 largest economies agreed in April to suspend about $20 billion in debt servicing payments for 73 nations, more than half of them in Africa. The group has called on private creditors to do the same, but efforts have been delayed…

LUSAKA (Capital Markets in Africa) — Zambia is seeking to restructure its debt after years of “over-ambition” in borrowing to plug an infrastructure deficit, Finance Minister Bwalya Ng’andu said. The southern African nation has stopped taking on new commercial debt and is seeking to cancel some loans that it’s contracted but not yet received, he said in an interview with the state broadcaster on Sunday. Zambia also aims to restructure loans already disbursed as the…