Finance

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…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — The Paris Club has waived $1.3 billion in debt payments for 18 of the world’s poorest countries to help them free up resources to battle the coronavirus pandemic. So far, 32 of the 73 countries eligible for relief have requested a suspension of payments until the end of the year, the club, an informal grouping of 22 country lenders, said Tuesday in a statement. The suspension is part of…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — Saudi Arabia, de facto leader of the OPEC cartel, held a call with fellow member Nigeria as the organization strives to deliver production cuts aimed at bolstering global crude markets. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari discussed “ways of cooperation to enhance the stability” of the market during a phone call on Monday, the state-run Saudi Press Agency reported. It’s unusual for the prince, who is effectively the…

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — Of the more than $110 billion in additional funding that sub-Saharan Africa will need this year to fight the coronavirus pandemic, $44 billion has not been financed yet even after several countries have taken up emergency loans and debt-service relief initiatives, according to the International Monetary Fund. The funding needs persist despite the IMF approving debt-service relief for 21 sub-Saharan African countries for an initial six-month phase ending mid-October…