Finance

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Market in Africa) – Moody’s Investors Service downgraded South Africa’s Sasol Ltd.to junk, citing high debt and cost overruns at its Lake Charles chemical project in Louisiana. The ratings company cut its assessment on Sasol’s long-term rating to Ba1, from Baa3, with a stable outlook, it said in a statement on Thursday. “The decision to downgrade the ratings to Ba1 reflects Moody’s view that Sasol’s financial leverage will remain elevated over the next two…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – Investors are chasing South African dollar bonds as the flight to safety sparked by the spread of the coronavirus eclipses the country’s idiosyncratic risks, including a key budget this week and the possibility of a credit downgrade to junk soon after. While the rand and local-currency bonds lost ground on Monday amid a global risk selloff, yields on South Africa’s hard-currency bonds held near multi-month lows, tracking the plunge in U.S. Treasury rates as investors…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – The Trump administration is poised to argue before the Supreme Court that victims of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi should be compensated by Sudan, which at that time harboured the attack’s plotters, Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda members. In a session scheduled for Monday, President Donald Trump’s solicitor general will add the weight of the federal government to the civil suit brought by the families of…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – South African Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s budget this week is unlikely to convince Moody’s Investors Service that he has a credible plan to rein in government debt. Of 19 economists surveyed by Bloomberg this month, 14 expect Moody’s to downgrade the country to junk this year and nine of those say it’ll happen in the first half. That’s after the rating company in November cut the outlook on the nation’s…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – The African Development Bank said the criticism that World Bank President David Malpass levied against the multilateral lender and similar institutions for lending too easily to heavily indebted countries were misleading. Malpass voiced his concern over the practices of lenders that also include the Asian Development Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development at a World Bank-International Monetary Fund forum in Washington on Monday, saying some were worsening already-challenging debt situations,…

JOHANNESBURG (Capital Markets in Africa) – New ideas are hard to come by, so it was a case of deja vu for many investors when President Cyril Ramaphosa again touted the idea of a state-owned South African bank and sovereign wealth fund. The desire for the country’s wealth, minerals, land and its banks to be owned and shared by all South Africans harks back to 1955 when the now ruling African National Congress and allies against racial…

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) – Talks on the post-Brexit future of European capital markets have largely avoided the toxic haggling of the broader negotiations — until now. U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid and chief European Union negotiator Michel Barnier traded blows Tuesday as the two sides approach a self-imposed June deadline to make progress. The flashpoint is the very foundation of the future relationship: A policy called “equivalence” that would give U.K. firms continued access to…