A government statement issued on Tuesday announced that the CA Lyon/BPI consortium had won the tender for the financing, which the government launched on 5 February.
Under an agreement signed last October between Mozambican President Armando Guebuza and Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates, Mozambique will own 85 per cent of the HCB shares, while the Portuguese participation will drop from the current 82 per cent to just 15 per cent.
Mozambique already owned 18 per cent of HCB. Under the October agreement, the government agreed to pay Portugal 700 million US dollars for 67 per cent of the shares. (The separate question of HCB's debt to the Portuguese treasury was solved with a payment of 250 million dollars from HCB's own coffers.) Banks were to put in their bids to raise the 700 million dollars by 15 April, and the government then hired an international auditing company to analyse the bids.
The bid from the Franco-Portuguese consortium was ranked the most favourable. CA Lyon is a French investment bank formed out of the merger between Credit Lyonais and Credit Agricole, while the BPI is already involved in the Mozambican financial market through a 30 per cent holding in the country's second largest commercial bank, the BCI-Fomento.
According to the government, there were four unsuccessful bids. One was from South African banks (Standard Bank, Rand Merchant Bank, and the DBSA - Development Bank of Southern Africa).
Another unsuccessful bid was put together by the largest Portuguese financial concern, the BCP, its Mozambican subsidiary, the Millennium-BIM, the South African ABSA (now part of the Barclays Group) and its Mozambican subsidiary, the Austral Bank, Nedbank of South Africa, and the smallest Mozambican commercial bank, the Mercantile and Investment Bank (BMI).
The other two bids came from a consortium of BNP Paribas of France and Deutsche Bank of Germany, and from Morgan Stanley of the United States on its own.
The CA Lyon/BPI consortium must now arrange the financial engineering needed to pay Portugal the 700 million dollars by the deadline of 31 December.
The government statement gave no details of how the money will be repaid, and what interest CA Lyon and the BPI will be charging. But since HCB is now a profitable concern, the debt can clearly be repaid out of the Mozambican state's share in its profits.
SOURCE: AIM
