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Thursday 31st of August 2017 |
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Macro Thoughts
Home Thoughts
The harder the life, the finer the person. Wilfred Thesiger |
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Somewhere in Mwingi, Kenya; the beautifully starred night skyline paints a surreal silhouette of a giant baobab tree. @Rey_matata Africa |
“I dream that I have found us both again, With spring so many strangers' lives away, And we, so free, Out walking by the sea, With someone else's paper words to say....
They took us at the gates of green return, Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why- Do children meet again? Does any trace remain, Along the superhighways of July?” ― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
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The Saudi Trillions Malise Ruthven LRB Law & Politics |
It made perfect sense that the first port of call on President Trump’s first foreign trip, in May, was Riyadh. Saudi Arabia – the world’s second largest oil producer (after Russia), the world’s biggest military spender as a proportion of GDP, the main sponsor of Islamist fighting groups across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Iraq, the leader of a coalition in a devastating war against Yemeni rebels now in its third year – is a country one can do business with, even as the most ardent Kremlinologists in the West struggle to understand it. It is a place often defined by its contradictions, in which tribal codes of desert and oasis – puritanical, patriarchal, frugal and austere – co-exist and frequently clash with lavish displays of wealth and such emblems of modernity as air-conditioned shopping malls, designer boutiques and six-lane highways flashing with supercharged vehicles exclusively driven by men. Trump returned from his visit with a promise – he claimed – of $350 billion in Saudi spending on American armaments over the next ten years, with $110 billion right away, of benefit particularly to Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. The State Department celebrated the deal as supporting ‘the long-term security of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region in the face of malign Iranian influence and Iranian-related threats’.
But the last few months have seen a series of changes in the kingdom that make its future more unpredictable than ever. At the beginning of June, Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties with its neighbour Qatar, demanding that its al-Jazeera network be shut down for broadcasting propaganda and launching a regional stand-off that is far from being resolved. Then, two weeks later, there was what appeared to be a palace coup. Since the death in 1953 of the modern kingdom’s founder, Abd al-Aziz Al Saud (generally known as Ibn Saud), succession has passed down the line of his sons. The present king, Salman, reportedly Ibn Saud’s 25th son, inherited the throne in 2015 on the death of his half-brother Abdullah and is close to being the last of his generation. At 81 Salman is in fragile health: he has had two strokes and suffers from Alzheimer’s. On 21 June the doting king promoted his favourite son, the 31-year-old Prince Mohammed bin Salman (widely known by the initials MBS), to the position of crown prince, putting him in line to be the first of the third generation – Ibn Saud’s grandsons – to occupy the throne. According to the New York Times, MBS’s elevation at the expense of his older cousin, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef (known as MBN), was the result of a well-executed plot. MBN had been highly regarded by the US and its allies: as head of the interior ministry and chief of Saudi intelligence he presided over operations against al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP); he had attended training sessions with the FBI and was a powerful advocate of continued close relations with the Americans. In February the CIA honoured him with the George Tenet medal, in recognition of his ‘excellent intelligence performance in the domain of counterterrorism and his unbounded contribution to realise world security and peace’.
On the night of 20 June, the eve of the Eid al-Fitr festival that ends the holy month of Ramadan, MBN was summoned along with other senior princes for an audience with the king. Shortly before midnight courtiers answering to MBS – who was already chief of the royal court as well as the world’s youngest minister of defence – removed his phones and pressured him to relinquish his posts. MBN at first refused but eventually gave in and is now said to be under palace arrest. Afterwards clips of MBN paying allegiance to his younger cousin were shown on Saudi media, to demonstrate a smooth transition, and it was put about – this time by US as well as Saudi officials – that MBN had been suffering from the effects of the ‘arsehole bomb’ attack in 2009, when an al-Qaida operative masquerading as a petitioner approached him and blew himself up with an IED hidden in his rectum. MBN survived the attack but was said to have become addicted to medication he had been taking to mitigate the effects of the trauma. Members of the Allegiance Council, a body of 34 senior princes established by King Abdullah in 2006 to resolve disputes by approving changes in the line of succession, were told that MBN had a drug problem and was unfit to be king. Despite private reservations, the council deferred to King Salman and rubber-stamped its approval, in a vote of 31 to three.
While not dismissing the claims about his health, at least one foreign diplomat and a well-placed Saudi source suggested that MBN had opposed the Saudi-led embargo on Qatar, and that this was the real reason for his fall. As in early modern Europe, palace politics in Arabia and the Gulf are not driven just by private ambitions but reflect wider geopolitical struggles. MBS is said to be close to his mentor Muhammad bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy commander of the armed forces of the United Arab Emirates, the region’s most effective – and most interventionist – military power. Recent Emirati successes include taking the ports of Mukalla and Shihr in southern Yemen from AQAP, as well as two strategic islands in the Bab al-Mandab strait between Arabia and Africa, through which tankers carrying four million barrels of oil pass each day. Bin Zayed is thought to be the driving force behind the UAE-Saudi rivalry with Qatar which MBN was resisting. As one commentator tweeted after the coup, ‘bin Zayed has become the real ruler of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the two largest Arab countries. Congratulations to the people of these two countries …’
In this scenario MBS – now abetted by Trump – appears as the useful idiot. As defence minister, he was in charge of launching the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, which has been responsible for the killing of thousands of civilians in airstrikes and the displacement of more than three million people. According to the UN, 80 per cent of Yemen’s population is now in need of humanitarian aid that can’t reach the country thanks to the Saudi blockade; the lack of food and clean water has led to widespread malnutrition and at least 500,000 cases of cholera. Meanwhile, the Saudis’ military targets, the Houthi rebels who oppose the president they have protected in office, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, show no signs of giving up. Saudi Arabia has consistently accused the Houthis of being Iranian proxies, a charge that was once untrue but which effectively had the force of a prediction, since as the war has ground on Iran has stepped up its military aid to the rebels, partly to prevent total devastation.
The diplomatic and economic campaign against Qatar, too, can be seen as an expansionist move, part of a Saudi-UAE effort to counter what they present as Iranian influence. As Richard Sokolsky and Aaron David Miller put it in an article for Politico,
The crown prince engineered this dispute not to punish Qatar for its financing of terrorism (a hypocritical comment coming from the Saudis, whose own citizens have provided funding to radical extremists over the years), but rather to end Qatar’s independent foreign policy and especially its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its ties with Iran. Simply put, the Saudis want to turn Qatar into a vassal state – as they have done with Bahrain – as part of their plan to establish Saudi hegemony over the entire Persian Gulf.
But Qatar has its reasons to co-operate with Iran – not least the fact that the countries share ownership of the world’s largest natural gas field – and, partly through the offices of al-Jazeera, the only measurably independent news organisation in the region, it has shown itself more tolerant than any of its neighbours of the dissenting political movements whose fortunes improved with the Arab Spring. For the Saudi princes, the Muslim Brotherhood et al are an internal threat not to be countenanced. In this sense, the Saudi offensives against Yemen and Qatar seem less part of a plan for regional domination than a defensive operation designed to stoke up anti-Iranian and anti-Shia feeling at home – even when the Iranian influence is largely invented. ‘We are a primary target for the Iranian regime,’ MBS said in May, shortly before Trump’s visit, accusing the Iranians of seeking to take over Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia. ‘We won’t wait for the battle to be in Saudi Arabia. Instead, we’ll work so that the battle is for them in Iran.’ Chauvinism can be a useful asset for a ruler.
All this investment will require significant resources, and a central part of the plan is to sell off 5 per cent of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest corporation, worth possibly $2 trillion, dwarfing Apple, Google, Amazon or ExxonMobil, and listing it on a foreign stock exchange in the world’s biggest ever IPO: Hong Kong, Singapore and London are among the contenders for the listing. Oil revenue – until recently Aramco’s profits were taxed at 85 per cent by the Saudi government – will be replaced by a vast sovereign wealth fund, to be invested in property and businesses abroad as well as at home, much as Qatar already does; the as yet relatively small Saudi fund began its overseas adventures last year with a $3.5 billion investment in Uber. But getting hold of the hundreds of billions that would be generated by an IPO means acceding to transparency rules that a company still 95 per cent owned by the Saudi state would find it hard to comply with. The London Stock Exchange, in its desperation for the prize, has shown that it is perfectly prepared to bend the rules in Aramco’s favour. Even so, a public listing – at the level Saudi Arabia expects – depends on the price of oil rising or at least not falling further; it also depends on the Saudis’ oil reserves being quite as large as they claim. In the face of all this uncertainty, Nick Butler, an ex-BP executive, recently suggested in the Financial Times that Saudi Arabia’s best option may be a private sale to China.
The kingdom has more trivial money worries too. The Al Saud are a royal family like no other: there are thousands of them, descending from the 22 wives Ibn Saud had while technically observing the Sharia requirement of four wives – max – at any one time. He was ‘father to the nation’ in more than a metaphorical sense. In the context of a tribal society, these prudential intermarriages had the benefit of binding together a number of different groups at a time when Ibn Saud was merely the head of a coalition of tribes who founded the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 after he invaded the Hejaz, with its holy cities, Mecca and Medina. The trouble, presently, is that his descendants all expect their emoluments. The scale of this burden can be gauged from a classified cable sent by Wyche Fowler, then US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to his government in November 1996, exposed by WikiLeaks, in which he reports that members of the Al Saud family receive stipends ranging from $270,000 a month for more senior princes to $8000 ‘for the lowliest member of the most remote branch of the family’. The system is calibrated by generation, with surviving sons and daughters of Ibn Saud receiving between $200,000 and $270,000, grandchildren around $27,000, great-grandchildren around $13,000 and great-great-grandchildren the minimum $8000 per month. According to the US embassy’s calculations, in 1996 the budget for around sixty surviving sons and daughters, 420 grandchildren, 2900 great-grandchildren and ‘probably only about 2000 great-great-grandchildren at this point’ amounted to more than $2 billion, with the stipends providing ‘a substantial incentive for royals to procreate’ since – in addition to bonuses received on marriage for palace construction – a royal stipend begins at birth. One minor prince, according to a Saudi source, had persuaded a community college in the state of Oregon to enrol him even though he had no intention of attending classes: his principal goal in life was to have more children so he could increase his monthly allowance.
In addition to the stipends, senior princes enriched themselves via ‘off budget’ programmes that ‘are widely viewed as sources of royal rake-offs’. The largest of these, according to the cable, was thought to relate to the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina – around $5 billion annually –
The faith tradition that holds the Saudi system together – for now – is Wahhabi Islam, the iconoclastic creed of the 18th-century Islamic reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, whose pact with the Al Saud family led to the creation of the modern kingdom in 1932. Al-Wahhab’s stormtroopers, the Ikhwan, enabled Ibn Saud’s rise to power. They killed unarmed villagers regarded as apostates, thought nothing of slaughtering women and children, and routinely slit the throats of male captives. Contemporary accounts describe the horrors afflicted on the city of Taif in 1924, when the Ikhwan murdered hundreds of civilians, in a massacre similar to the violence committed by Islamic State or al-Qaida today. As an Arab witness wrote, Ibn Saud’s forces ‘normally give no quarter, sparing neither boys nor old men, veritable messengers of death from whose grasp no one escapes’. Some 400,000 people are reported to have been massacred by the Ikhwan during the early days of the Saudi state.
Al-Wahhab’s views on the veneration of Muslim holy men – exemplified by his destruction of the tomb of Zayd ibn al-Khattab, brother of Umar, the most revered of the early caliphs and a companion of the Prophet – are now used to legitimise the orgy of cultural vandalism inflicted on Mecca and Medina, over which the king claims religious guardianship as custodian of the Two Holy Shrines, a status that is quasi-caliphal (the Al Saud lack the lineage formally to declare themselves caliphs). The centre of Mecca, the sacred hub of Islam, now resembles Las Vegas, with hotels such as the Raffles Makkah Palace and the Makkah Hilton towering over the Kaaba, the cube-shaped temple to which Muslims everywhere bow in the direction of prayer. Beyond the sacred mosque is the Mekkah Clock Royal Tower, a kitsch rendition of Big Ben around five times as high – one of the world’s tallest buildings. Wealthy Gulf pilgrims are expected to pay premium prices for rooms and apartments in these buildings, as part of the effort to make up for the decline in oil prices. Even the Prophet Muhammad himself is not immune from the corrosive effects of Wahhabi iconoclasm, on the grounds that the veneration of the Prophet (as distinct from the worship of God) constitutes forbidden idolatry. The Prophet’s mawlid or birthday festival – widely observed with processions and family gatherings in other Muslim countries – is banned in the Saudi kingdom, while the name ‘Muhammad’ is often used disparagingly, as a catch-all for despised Muslim immigrants working as menials. The site of Muhammad’s first wife’s house, where it is believed he received his first revelations and where five of his children were born, is now occupied by a row of public toilets.
Simon Valentine, a British academic who spent four years in the kingdom teaching English, says that ‘meeting and talking with Saudis one soon perceives the fear that lurks behind the smiles, the sense that people are constantly aware of being watched, censored and condemned.’ Pascal Menoret, an anthropologist who formed close relationships with the young male tearaways he describes in his brilliant ethnographic essay Joyriding in Riyadh (2014), reports that
surveillance, repression and eventually torture are realities that shape everyday life and deeply modify people’s interactions with each other – and with the anthropologist or field worker … This is a country where 12,000 to 30,000 political prisoners and prisoners of opinion rot in overcrowded, violent jails; a country where repression is organised by security forces that report to a handful of senior princes, out of the reach of an abrupt, arbitrary judicial system; a country where physical punishment, torture and the threat thereof, in the absence of transparent and fair procedures, are the alpha and omega of the judiciary and the ultima ratio of political acquiescence.
The Saudi strategy towards the Shia minority – around three million people in the oil-bearing Eastern Province and 250,000 in the southwest region of Najran – has been carefully calculated over the years, as Toby Matthiesen explains in The Other Saudis: Shiism, Dissent and Sectarianism (2014). When Ibn Saud took over the Eastern Province in 1913 its Shia inhabitants, mostly sedentary people engaged in agriculture, trade, fishing and pearl diving, who had enjoyed relative autonomy for centuries under Ottoman rule, became ‘subjects of a political entity that does not treat Shia Muslims as equal citizens’.
Rather than reinforcing the anti-Shia dynamic with multi-billion-dollar arms packages, the West should be using its power to counter the force of reactionary Sunni sectarianism that is the curse of modern Islam and the real source of extremism in the region.
Conclusions
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"The Saudis don't care about Syria anymore," said a senior western diplomat. "It's all Qatar for them. Syria is lost." Law & Politics |
In recent months, as supplies of aid, money and weapons to Syria’s opposition have dwindled, it had clung to the hope that ongoing international political support would prevent an outright victory for Bashar al-Assad and his backers. Not any more.
An announcement earlier this week by Jordan – one of the opposition’s most robust supporters – that “bilateral ties with Damascus are going in the right direction” has, for many, marked a death knell for the opposition cause.
Within the ranks of the political opposition, and regional allies, the statement was the opening act of something that all had dreaded: normalisation with a bitter foe. And without anything much to show for it.
Emphasising his words, Jordanian government spokesman Mohammad al-Momani said: “This is a very important message that everyone should hear.” And indeed, the about-face in Amman was quickly noted in Ankara, Doha, and Riyadh, where – after seven and a-half years of war – states that were committed to toppling the Syrian leader are now resigned to him staying.
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Has Netanyahu Defeated the Palestinians? Law & Politics |
With the likelihood of his being indicted and speculation as to his longevity in office reaching unprecedented levels, Netanyahu struck back. In a support rally convened by his Likud Party, Netanyahu accused “the thought police in the media,” together with the left, and supported by the Palestinians, of conducting an “unprecedented, obsessive witch-hunt campaign” against him and his family. Their goal, he claimed, was to stage “a government overthrow” to topple “the national camp.” Both the style and substance of Netanyahu’s fiery rhetoric should have sounded very familiar to anyone in America not asleep for the past seven months.
That part of his speech was an appeal to his base. But Netanyahu’s lengthy term in office, multiple electoral successes, and ability to hold together a governing coalition in Israel’s rambunctious political system is also predicated on him having a message that resonates with a broader public. It is a sales pitch that Netanyahu repeated at that rally, that he had “brought the state of Israel to the best situation in its history, a rising global force . . . the state of Israel is diplomatically flourishing.” Netanyahu had beaten back what he had called the “fake-news claim” that without a deal with the Palestinians “Israel will be isolated, weakened and abandoned” facing a “diplomatic tsunami.”
Difficult though it is for his political detractors to acknowledge, Netanyahu’s claim resonates with the public because it reflects something that is real, and that has shifted the center of gravity of Israeli politics further and further to the right. It is a claim that if correct and replicable over time will leave a legacy that lasts well beyond Netanyahu’s premiership and any indictment he might face.
Netanyahu’s assertion is that he is not merely buying time in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians to improve the terms of an eventual and inevitable compromise. Netanyahu is laying claim to something different—the possibility of ultimate victory, the permanent and definitive defeat of the Palestinians, their national and collective goals.
In over a decade as prime minister, Netanyahu has consistently and unequivocally rejected any plans or practical steps that even begin to address Palestinian aspirations. Netanyahu is all about perpetuating and exacerbating the conflict, not about managing it, let alone resolving it. He seeks out long-neglected scars to poke anew and hones in on what appears most existentially angst-ridden.
We have, or so it seems, now entered the phase in which Netanyahu wants to own the new paradigm and to claim victory.
Conclusions
Yes he has.
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@realDonaldTrump's debt to @DeutscheBank @FT Law & Politics |
When Donald Trump sued Deutsche Bank in late 2008, it was “classic Trump”, according to the German bank, which sued him back.
The New York property developer was trying to wriggle out of $40m of personal guarantees he had supplied on a $640m loan to build Trump International Hotel & Tower in downtown Chicago. The Lehman Brothers crisis was an unimaginable event that should get him off the hook, he argued. The future US president sought damages of $3bn — because the Deutsche-led consortium of lenders had just played a part in wrecking the world economy.
The two sides sparred for a while before settling out of court. And within a couple of years Deutsche was back as Mr Trump’s go-to lender, continuing a relationship that has endured for decades, even as other big banks have deserted the litigation-prone developer.
In June, Mr Trump disclosed outstanding loans from Deutsche of at least $130m, secured against properties in Miami and Washington in addition to the condominium-hotel in Chicago. The total is likely to be about $300m, according to people familiar with his borrowings.
“Deutsche seem to come through for him on a pretty regular basis,” says a person involved in the refinancing of the General Motors Building in Manhattan, one of the bank’s breakthrough US deals with Mr Trump, in the late 1990s.
“They stepped into a void,” says another restructuring expert.
A client like Mr Trump would be offered a choice of terms, according to a person familiar with the deals: an interest rate of, say, Libor plus 500 basis points with a guarantee, or Libor plus 800 without.
Deutsche’s key recruit was Jon Vaccaro from Citibank, who arrived as global head of commercial real estate in 1997. Other important figures for Mr Trump, over the years, were Mike Offit and Steve Stuart, a duo who joined from Goldman Sachs, and Eric Schwartz, a recruit from Moody’s who became the developer’s primary point of contact.
“He put out good product,” remembers one ex-Deutsche banker. “His buildings were high-quality, he got good rents from retail and he sold condos for high prices.”
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07-AUG-2017 :: Deutsche Bank loans were surely "mirror" transactions Law & Politics |
Any financial expert will tell you that President Trump’s financial affairs are a ‘’smoking gun.’’ Deutsche Bank loans were surely ‘’mirror’’ transactions, where Deutsche Bank was a commission agent interposed between Trump and the real lender. All those sales where Trump proclaimed himself a ‘’genius’’ because they were so off-market, we would all be incredulous, were essentially just that ‘’incredible’’. ere is a prima facie case here and its in plain sight.
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Venezuela Cut Deeper Into Junk by Fitch on 'Probable' Default Emerging Markets |
Fitch Ratings lowered Venezuela’s grade deeper into junk, saying additional U.S. sanctions increase the probability of non-payment.
Fitch reduced the nation’s long-term foreign and local currency ratings to CC, just two notches from default, from CCC on Wednesday. S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service also rank the country at speculative levels.
"The expected reduction in the international reserve position in the context of sanctions will severely test the government’s capacity and willingness to continue with timely debt service," Fitch analyst Richard Francis wrote in a statement.
Speculation on a Venezuelan default is mounting as international reserves tumble to a 15-year low and U.S. sanctions further restrict the nation’s financing options. The implied probability of the country missing a payment over the next 12 months rose to 64 percent from 63 percent the month prior, according to credit-default swaps data compiled by Bloomberg. The odds of a credit event over the next five years increased to 97 percent.
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Angola Oil Minister Says Nation Needs Crude to Rebound to $60 [not going to happen] Africa |
Angola’s Petroleum Minister Jose Maria Botelho de Vasconcelos said it’s essential for the southern African nation’s economy that oil prices rebound to $60 a barrel this year.
“That would be extremely important,” Botelho de Vasconcelos said Monday in an interview in the country’s capital Luanda. “We’ve been getting signs from the market that prices could reach $60 by the end of the year.”
“Oil helped relaunch the diversification of the economy but it can’t continue to have so much weight in the economy,” Botelho de Vasconcelos said.
Angola was the world’s fourth-biggest coffee producer and a top exporter of sugarcane, bananas, sisal and cotton before a 27-year civil war after independence from Portugal in 1975 led to a mass exodus of farmers to the cities. Today, the country has the world’s most concentrated economy in terms of exports after Iraq, according to the United Nations Development Programme,
Conclusions
They kicked the can down the road.
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Congo Bonds Surge on News Investors Will Be Paid Africa |
The Republic of Congo’s Eurobonds rose to the highest in more than seven weeks after a contractor claiming money from the government ended an attempt to block a coupon payment through a U.S. court.
The price on the $363 million of amortizing securities due in June 2029 rose about 7 cents to 78 cents on the dollar as of 3:03 p.m. in London, the highest since July 11 and equating to a yield of 11.7 percent.
The rally happened after Delaware Trust Co., the trustee, announced in a statement Tuesday that $21 million of overdue principal and interest will be transferred to investors soon, according to two people familiar with the matter who weren’t authorized to comment publicly. Commissions Import Export SA, a company alleging it’s owed money from the Republic of Congo’s government, on the same day withdrew its attempt to block the payments through the District Court for the Southern District of New York, according to the people.
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Airtel Kenya ended the 2016 financial year with a Sh45 billion debt load @bd_africa Kenyan Economy |
The report, which was published on the Delhi-based parent company’s website, has for the very first time made public the inner details of the company’s financial health – that has left the company deep in the loss-making territory.
Airtel’s current liabilities of Sh55.3 billion in the year to December 2016 far exceeded its current assets worth Sh9.7 billion, indicating Kenya’s second largest telecoms operator is technically insolvent.
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Liberty Kenya Holdings reports H1 2017 EPS +19.697% Earnings here Kenyan Economy |
Par Value: Closing Price: 13.95 Total Shares Issued: 535707499.00 Market Capitalization: 7,473,119,611 EPS: 1.17 PE: 11.923
Liberty Kenya Holdings H1 2017 results through 30th June 2017 vs. 30th June 2016 H1 Gross earned premium revenue 4.895741b vs. 4.778366b +2.456% H1 Less : outward reinsurance [2.138128b] vs. [1.959842b] +9.097% H1 Net insurance premium revenue 2.757613b vs. 2.818524b -2.161% H1 Investment income 1.738716b vs. 1.497893b +16.077% H1 Other income 26.498m vs. [29.162m] +190.865% H1 Total income 5.042940b vs. 4.705414b +7.173% H1 Claims and policyholder benefits payable [3.053411b] vs. [2.379677b] +28.312% H1 Change in insurance contract liabilities [460.731m] vs. [498.359m] -7.550% H1 Amounts recoverable from reinsurers 1.213956b vs. 767.730m +58.123% H1 Net insurance benefits and claims [2.300186b] vs. [2.110306b] +8.998% H1 Total expenses and commissions [2.195767b] vs. [2.104993b] +4.312% H1 Other operating expenses [1.536146b] vs. [1.532874b] +0.213% H1 Results of operating activities 546.987m vs. 490.115m +11.604% H1 Profit for the period 422.508m vs. 355.431m +18.872% Basic and diluted EPS 0.79 vs. 0.66 +19.697% Cash and cash equivalents 4.629182b vs. 3.652264b +26.748% Total equity 7.031845b vs. 6.451954b +8.988% Financial investments 23.287367b vs. 22.991458b +1.287% Total assets 36.605457b vs. 35.108136b +4.265% Insurance contract liabilities 13.060746b vs. 11.625990b +12.341%
Company Commentary
The Group gross earned premiums increased by 2% with the Kenyan operations exceeding prior period in the first Half of the year compared to 2016. Tanzania business however faced a challenging beginning to the year due to a continued difficult trading environment, further aggravated by competitive pressures. The Outlook for the remainder of 2017 remains positive barring any unexpected fundamental changes in legislative and macro-economic environment.
H1 PAT +19% H1 Investment Income +16% H1 EPS +19%
Group's earnings after tax improved by 19% compared to last year buoyed by improved investment returns and modest increase in earned premiums. Business fundamentals are sound with claims increases within range and operating expenses flat on prior year despite inflationary pressures.
Conclusions
Investment Income up strong. +28.32% increase in Claims and policyholder benefits payable. Well and conservatively managed balance sheet with a further uplift in investment income and Mark to Market gains expected
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Trans-Century reports H1 2017 EPS [2.88] Earnings here Kenyan Economy |
Par Value: Closing Price: 7.70 Total Shares Issued: 280284476.00 Market Capitalization: 2,158,190,465 EPS: -1.56 PE: -4.936
TransCentury Limited H1 2017 results through 30th June 2017 vs. 30th June 2016
H1 Turnover 2.993560b vs. 4.139670b -27.686% H1 Loss from operations [594.958m] vs. [241.727m] -146.128% H1 Net other income 18.019m vs. 2.000094b -99.099% H1 Depreciation and amortisation [330.215m] vs. [365.209m] -9.582% H1 Net finance costs [368.331m] vs. [202.106m] +82.246% H1 [Loss]/ profit before income tax [1.275485b] vs. 1.191052b -207.089% H1 [Loss]/ profit for the period [1.040332b] vs. 1.313850b -179.182% Basic and diluted EPS [2.88] vs. 4.97 -157.948% Cash and cash equivalents at 30th June [277.406m] Total assets 18.176492b Total equity 2.410220b No interim dividend
Company Commentary
a decline in revenue by 28% and a Loss after Tax of 1.04b The Group's performance in H1 of the year was affected by the lingering effects of constrained access to credit lines in 2016 which slowed our project acquisition for most of 2016. Group remains strongly anchored on its competitive advantage that includes; unrivalled capacity in the Power division and a strong pipeline of projects in the engineering division. Demand from our markets remains strong and we are keenly focused on growing our order book s we'll as ongoing work on restructuring to further adjust our cost structure. An area of priority for the group remains restructuring of the balance sheet to improve the capital structure.
Conclusions
They have found an anchor Shareholder now the challenge is to execute.
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ExPress Kenya reports H1 2017 EPS [0.76] Earnings here Kenyan Economy |
Par Value: 5/- Closing Price: 3.90 Total Shares Issued: 35403790.00 Market Capitalization: 138,074,781 EPS: -2.74 PE: -1.423
Express Kenya Limited is a Kenya based company engaged in the provision of clearing and forwarding services for air and sea, as well as warehousing and logistics services.
H1 Revenue 35.079m vs. 34.661m +1.207% H1 Direct costs [29.123m] vs. [21.975m] +35.528% H1 Gross profit 5.956m vs. 12.686m -53.051% H1 Other operating income 4.324m vs. 3.528m +22.562% H1 Administrative expenses [22.276m] vs. [17.999m] +23.762% H1 Other operating expenses [18.361m] vs. [20.363m] -9.832% H1 Operating [Loss] [30.357m] vs. [22.148m] -37.064% H1 [Loss] before tax [37.449m] vs. [31.106m] -20.392% H1 [Loss] for the period/ year [26.824m] vs. [31.106m] -13.766% Basic and diluted [loss] per share [0.76] vs. [0.88] -13.636% Shareholders’ funds [3.466961m] Cash and cash equivalents at end of period/ year [48.814m] vs. [48.435m] +0.782%
Conclusions
I cannot recall when they last made a profit.
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