Ivory Coast to Raise 2020 Offshore Funding From Banks, Eurobonds
Ivory Coast to Raise 2020 Offshore Funding From Banks, Eurobonds
Ivory Coast will raise about 500 billion CFA francs ($822 million) through bank loans and a sale of Eurobonds to meet its offshore funding needs ahead of October elections.
The West African nation budgeted to secure 1.5 trillion CFA francs of debt in 2020 and the government would prefer to raise as much as 1 trillion francs on the regional market of West Africa’s French-speaking countries, Prime Minister Gon Coulibaly told reporters Thursday in Abidjan, the economic hub. Of the remaining portion, at least 230 billion francs will be secured with an issuance of hard-currency bonds, he said.
The government has set a mid-year deadline to finalize its international borrowing requirements to avoid raising funds close to October’s elections, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.
“We will see when the best period will be” Coulibaly said.
Favorable conditions could prompt Ivory Coast to raise more debt from the international bond market than its budget requires. Last year, it sold 1.7 billion euros of securities in October, of which more than half was used to redeem other debts.
African peers such as Gabon and Ghana have already sold foreign bonds in 2020. That lowered the cost of their debt at a time when sluggish global economic growth and corresponding central bank interest rate cuts, as well as concerns about the impact of the coronavirus, are spurring demand for high-yielding hard-currency bonds.
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Elsewhere in Africa, Nigeria plans to sell $3.3 billion in Eurobonds while Benin may also again offer euro-denominated bonds after a debut issue of 500 million euros in March 2019.
Ivory Coast will hold presidential elections in October at a time when political alliances are shifting, risking the stability that supported its economy to expand by 7% or more every year since 2012.
The last power transition in the world’s biggest cocoa producer was in 2011, when Ouattara first took office. That was preceded by five months of post-election violence after ex-President Laurent Gbagbo refused to accept defeat.
To contact the reporters on this story: Baudelaire Mieu in Abidjan at bmieu@bloomberg.net;Katarina Hoije in Abidjan at khoije@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andre Janse van Vuuren at ajansevanvuu@bloomberg.net, Chris Kay
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