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Friday 10th of November 2017 |
Morning Africa |
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0930-1500 KENYA TIME
Normal Board - The Whole shebang
Prompt Board Next day settlement
Expert Board All you need re an Individual stock.
The Latest Daily PodCast can be found here on the Front Page of the site
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Gorgeous #map shows economic status of world population @simongerman600 Africa |
Gorgeous #map shows economic status of world population. Check for stark differences between neighbours. The stronger the #wealth gap between nations the more likely borders are to be strictly controlled and regulated
Home Thoughts
"The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance.To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget" - Arundhati Roy
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Saad Hariri's resignation as Prime Minister of Lebanon is not all it seems Law & Politics |
When Saad Hariri’s jet touched down at Riyadh on the evening of 3 November, the first thing he saw was a group of Saudi policemen surrounding the plane. When they came aboard, they confiscated his mobile phone and those of his bodyguards. Thus was Lebanon’s prime minister silenced.
Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman’s “Night of the Long Knives” did indeed begin at night, only hours after Hariri’s arrival in Riyadh. So what on earth is the crown prince up to?
Put bluntly, he is clawing down all his rivals and – so the Lebanese fear – trying to destroy the government in Beirut, force the Shia Hezbollah out of the cabinet and restart a civil war in Lebanon. It won’t work, for the Lebanese – while not as rich – are a lot smarter than the Saudis. Every political group in the country, including Hezbollah, are demanding one thing only: Hariri must come back. As for Saudi Arabia, those who said that the Arab revolution will one day reach Riyadh – not with a minority Shia rising, but with a war inside the Sunni Wahhabi royal family – are watching the events of the past week with both shock and awe.
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The Saudi Purge Isn't Just a Power Grab Businessweek Law & Politics |
It makes sense to be cynical about Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s ostensible crackdown on corruption in Saudi Arabia. Among the 11 princes, 4 ministers, and dozens of well-known businessmen arrested were some of the 32-year-old’s last potential rivals to the Saudi throne. The move also smacks of an asset snatch. Police nabbed 3 of the Arab world’s 10 richest men, including investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the billionaire best known for rescuing Citicorp in 1991 and making big bets on Apple Inc. and 21st Century Fox Inc. But was it only a Machiavellian power play? Or is this the start of a dramatic, go-for-broke attempt to transform a country that’s resisted change for decades?
Prince Mohammed seems to be playing the equally ruthless roles of autocrat and reformer. The millennial has been outspoken about his bold plans to modernize Saudi society and wean the kingdom from fossil fuel. Now, Prince Mohammed has locked up globe-trotting tycoons and other dynastic rivals, sending shock waves across the desert and around the world. Since Saudi Arabia’s founding in 1932 by his grandfather, Abdulaziz Al Saud, successive kings have sought consensus among the family’s thousands of princes, balancing religious, princely, and tribal factions to maintain stability in the world’s largest oil supplier. Decisions were made at a glacial pace, often capped with generous payouts for anyone left unhappy. Prince Mohammed has smashed that conservative status quo in an act, he no doubt believes, of creative destruction.
This is a man of dead-certain belief in himself, who told this magazine in a long, autobiographical interview in April 2016 that his childhood experiences among princes and potentates were more valuable and formative than Steve Jobs’s, Mark Zuckerberg’s, and Bill Gates’s. So, he wondered aloud, “if I work according to their methods, what will I create?” Now we know his disruptive potential.
The prince is racing the clock. When he and his father came to power in 2015, oil prices had recently plummeted, leaving the country in imminent danger of a budget meltdown. They slashed spending and reduced subsidies for energy and water, grounding the economy to a halt. With little prospect that oil prices will rise much higher, the country has only about four more years at its current rate of deficit spending until its currency reserves are depleted. “Four years is not a long time; time is running out,” says Ziad Daoud, an economist with Bloomberg.
Conclusions
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08-MAY-2017 :: "How can I communicate with them while they prepare for the arrival of al-Mahdi al-Montazar?" Law & Politics |
The OPEC “Go-Go” days of Sheikh Yamani, his prayer beads and delphic pronouncements belong to yesteryear. Mohammed Sanusi Barkindo, the current OPEC secretary-general, is a poor imitation of Yamani and is playing with a set of cards that is stacked against him. Reserves have been depleted from Abuja to Riyadh, from Luanda to Caracas and in all the oil producing capitals in the world. So many capitals are fiddling while sitting on a tinderbox and playing with matches. The deputy Crown Prince was quoted on Al-Arabiyya about Iran: “How can I communicate with them while they prepare for the arrival of al-Mahdi al-Montazar?”
This is deluded thinking at a time when things could seriously fall apart:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere e ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand [W.B Yeats The Second Coming]
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Qatar debt project would be grandiose in its ambitions. "Control the yield curve, decide the future" @theintercept Law & Politics |
The economic warfare involved an attack on Qatar’s currency using bond and derivatives manipulation. The plan, laid out in a slide deck provided to The Intercept through the group Global Leaks, was aimed at tanking Qatar’s economy, according to documents drawn up by a bank outlining the strategy.
The outline, prepared by Banque Havilland, a private Luxembourg-based bank owned by the family of controversial British financier David Rowland, laid out a scheme to drive down the value of Qatar’s bonds and increase the cost of insuring them, with the ultimate goal of creating a currency crisis that would drain the country’s cash reserves.
The Qatar debt project would be grandiose in its ambitions. “Control the yield curve, decide the future,” reads the planning document, referring to a standard financial-industry graph showing a country’s borrowing costs for debt that is due at different dates. The height and shape of the yield curve is thought to be a reflection of how healthy an economy is and influences what financing options are available to a country.
Targeting a nation’s economy using financial manipulation would be a dramatic break from traditional norms of diplomacy and even warfare.
Banque Havilland does not trade in bonds, securities, CDS, or any other instruments of Qatar and it has no plans to do so,” Kozlov said, reading a statement. As for the plan to take down Qatar, he said, “The bank is a prestigious private banking group and will not be drawn into or make comments on what are political storylines.”
The cost of insuring Qatari debt has risen some 70 percent since May, the stock market is down 24 percent this year, and yields are rising ahead of a bond offering to be made by the end of the year. Ahead of that debt sale,
In other words, the UAE plans to short Qatar, then drive it into the ground by manipulating international financial markets, all while gaining diplomatic leverage against its rival.
If all goes according to plan, the next move would be to force Qatar to blow through its cash to prop up its currency. “Maintaining the peg requires extensive use of central bank foreign exchange reserves,” reads the outline’s mission statement. The idea would be that as the Qatari bond market tanks, so will the country’s currency. And as holders of Qatar’s currency sell it off and exchange it for dollars, the country’s dollar reserves plummet.
The basic premise of the plan — that Qatar is spending billions of dollars to offset the pain inflicted by the blockade and that the country’s currency is vulnerable — is largely correct. Just before the blockade against Qatar was enacted, the sheikdom held at least $35 billion in currency reserves. After the embargo, Qatar’s reserves plummeted as it spent to prop up its currency and keep its economy afloat. The country now holds just under $24 billion in reserves, though a recent accounting maneuver roughly doubled that number.
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12 JUN 17 :: Rolling Over Qatar @TheStarKenya Law & Politics |
The House of Saud’s protector has always been the US but this time an American president has excelled himself at extracting a mindbogglingly egregious price. I have to surmise that the emir of Qatar baulked at the price and that his adversaries are saying OK, we can always do it by force because this looks like a mugging in a dark alley, now
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The House of Trump and the House of Saud FT Law & Politics |
You might say it is a match made in heaven. With their taste in gold elevators, the Trump family and the House of Saud were destined to alight at the same penthouse. But the affinity between Donald Trump, US president, and Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto monarch, goes beyond a shared aesthetic for “dictator chic”. It is chiefly transactional. The US-Saudi relationship is the quintessence of Trumpian diplomacy. Its flowering symbolises the decay in the US-led global order.
Mr Trump’s approach to foreign relations is a blend of family and money and a weakness for flattery. Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe pledged $50m to the Ivanka Trump-inspired Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative — the World Bank’s effort to seduce America’s first family. Mr Abe, whose first gift to Mr Trump was a gold-plated golf club, hosted Ms Trump in Tokyo shortly before her father turned up. Six months ago, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates became the first donors to Ms Trump’s scheme with a $100m grant. Now it is China’s turn to host Mr Trump. Its president, Xi Jinping, approved a flurry of Ivanka Trump trademarks shortly before he first met her father in Mar-a-Lago earlier this year.
It showed a president who cannot tell the difference between the national interest and his family business. It was the kind of self-dealing you would expect from a Saudi royal. But I repeat myself.
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"I will return to Zimbabwe to lead you," Mnangagwa said in a statement. Africa |
“Mugabe has faced challenges from outside before, but never an internal challenge. This time it is the machinery that has kept him in power that is now shuddering,” said Piers Pigou, an analyst with the International Crisis Group in Johannesburg.
“She is a psychotic case … now she has obliged her senile and doting husband to leave power to her. The whole nation is outraged,” he said.
Pigou, the analyst, said: “Mugabe’s brinkmanship may have backfired but he still has a lot of cards up his sleeve.”
Fears of the return of hyperinflation have led to panic-buying and rocketing prices in Zimbabwe, while confidence in the parallel “bond note” currency, launched by the government nearly a year ago, has collapsed.
Conclusions
This promotion of Grace will not last a moment longer than her husband's life.
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The Brothers Who Bought South Africa Africa |
“The Ax Has Fallen”
The beginning of the end of Nhlanhla Nene’s political career came on a warm Monday morning. He was catching up on email in his office in Pretoria’s neoclassical Old Reserve Bank building, where he was serving as South Africa’s minister of finance, when his deputy, Mcebisi Jonas, asked for an urgent meeting. Jonas had been desperate to speak to his boss for days, but what he wanted to tell Nene was far too sensitive to discuss by phone.
Nene, a veteran trade union activist, has heavily lidded eyes, the build of a retired rugby player, and a preternatural calm. He suggested to Jonas that they step onto an adjoining balcony, the better to avoid any listening devices. There, Jonas began his tale.
The previous Friday, Jonas said, he’d been summoned to a four-mansion compound in Johannesburg owned by the Gupta family—a clan of Indian-born businessmen known to wield substantial influence over South African politics. Ajay Gupta, the eldest of three brothers atop the family, was direct: Nene was becoming a problem. He explained that Jonas would soon replace Nene as finance minister and, in that capacity, would remove some senior officials who were also standing in the family’s way. Gupta spoke in the future tense, presenting Jonas’s appointment as a fait accompli.
Jonas was staggered. The Guptas have no governmental role, and ministers serve solely at the discretion of the president, Jacob Zuma. Jonas said as much and made his way toward the door. As he did, Jonas would later tell investigators, Gupta said his family could put 600 million rand, or about $43 million, into an account of Jonas’s choice. And if Jonas happened to have a bag with him, he could have 600,000 rand in cash right away. (The Gupta family denies the meeting occurred.)
“Nonsense,” he told Jonas. “Those guys can’t remove me.” The best response, Nene said, was to focus on their work. They had a budget to prepare and Africa’s most sophisticated economy to run.
Just over six weeks later, on Dec. 9, 2015, Nene was leaving a cabinet meeting when he received a call from one of Zuma’s advisers asking him to report to the president’s office. Nene turned around to return to the Union Buildings, the sprawling hillside complex that houses the presidential administration. Zuma was waiting for him. Speaking in a mix of English and his native Zulu, the president stood as he told Nene he was finished at the finance ministry, effective immediately, and should start preparing for a post at a government-backed bank. Nene, returning to his car, texted Jonas: “The ax has fallen.”
The Guptas are widely famous in South Africa but also deeply mysterious. They almost never speak in public. In a rare appearance last year, Ajay Gupta, a stout, floppy-haired figure in a black suit and open-necked gray button-down, told a hand-picked interviewer that he wanted to give “a straight answer. … I am not a lobbyist. I am not a state capturer. … I am a friend only.” The only capturing going on, he joked in surprisingly rough English, was in forcing him to talk. He spoke for less than seven minutes.
There is an almost fable-like quality to the Gupta brothers’ story. Their father, Shiv Kumar Gupta, was a trader of spices and soapstone powders in Saharanpur, a gritty industrial city on India’s northern plains. As his sons, born in the late 1960s and early ’70s, entered adulthood, he sent each of them in a different direction to seek fortune. Ajay went to Delhi, Rajesh to China, and Atul to Africa, which Shiv Kumar believed was on the verge of a transformational boom, like the U.S. a century earlier. Atul arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city and commercial capital, in 1993.
In 2005 the brothers began putting Zuma’s family on their payroll. They hired his son Duduzane, then in his early 20s, as an IT specialist; appointed Duduzane’s twin sister, Duduzile, as a company director; and made one of Zuma’s wives (polygamy is legal in South Africa, and Zuma currently has four) a communications officer.
Even so, Zuma remained formidable. He ran intelligence operations for the ANC in exile, giving him thick files on his colleagues, and his Zulu middle name, Gedleyihlekisa, translates roughly to “the one who laughs as he grinds his enemies.”
The day Maseko was scheduled to go see Ajay, his cellphone rang. He recognized the number immediately, he said in an interview, expanding on an account he has previously laid out for investigators. It was the switchboard at South Africa’s presidential residence. Zuma came on the line. “These Gupta guys … need your help,” he said in Zulu. “Please help them.” Maseko was alarmed. Why would the president himself be involved?
The communications painted a picture of an intimate partnership between the Guptas, Duduzane, government ministers such as Zwane, and parastatal executives like Molefe. Around the time Glencore agreed to sell the Optimum mine to the Guptas, an email shows Zwane’s name on the passenger list for a flight on their private jet departing from Zurich to Delhi.
“If it were up to me and I made the rules,” President Zuma told supporters at a rally outside Johannesburg last year, speaking in Zulu, “I would ask for six months as a dictator.” Remove the constraints of the democratic system, he continued, and “you’d see wonders.”
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Carbacid Investments FY 17 PBT -16.63% Earnings release Kenyan Economy |
Par Value: 5/- Closing Price: 13.00 Total Shares Issued: 254851988.00 Market Capitalization: 3,313,075,844 EPS: 1.38 PE: 9.402
FY Turnover 589.380m vs. 831.761m -29.141% FY Gross profit 392.648m vs. 532.806m -26.306% FY Other income 36.589m vs. 40.805m -10.332% FY Administrative expenses [155.315m] vs. [173.511m] -10.487% FY Operating profit 273.922m vs. 400.100m -31.537% FY Finance and other income 146.619m vs. 178.768m -17.984% FY Fair value [Loss]/ gain on equity investments 11.115m vs. [31.120m] +135.717% FY Fair value gain on revaluation of investment property 25.000m vs. – FY PBT 456.656m vs. 547.748m -16.630% FY Profit for the year attributable to shareholders 352.300m vs. 375.568m -6.195% FY Total comprehensive income for the year 428.282m vs. 375.568m +14.036% Basic and diluted EPS 1.38 vs. 1.47 -6.122% Dividend per share 0.70 vs. 0.70 –
Company Commentary
A challenging year with increased competition and market challenges.
Conclusions
Big Turnover downshift of -29.141%
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COOP Bank Kenya reports Q3 2017 Earnings here Kenyan Economy |
Co-op Bank 3Q17 Results via Kestrel Loan book (net) increased by 14.2% y/y to KES 259.4bn. On a q/q basis the loan book (net) increased by 2.7%. Customer deposits increased by 12.1% y/y to KES 289.0bn. On a q/q basis customer deposits increased by 1.1%. Interest income declined by 7.7% y/y to KES 29.9bn – marginally above our expectation of KES 29.3bn. The decline was mainly on the back of a 6.9% y/y decline in interest income from loans and advances. Interest expense declined by 8.5% y/y to KES 9.1bn – marginally above our expectation of KES 8.9bn. Net interest income declined by 7.3% y/y to KES 20.8bn – marginally above our expectation of KES 20.4bn. Gross NPLs increased by 69.5% y/y to KES 16.9bn. This was mainly driven by delays in government payments on salaries impacting check-off loans. The increase in NPLs was further compounded by the real estate slowdown - and Co-op Bank wanted to be proactive in recognising NPLs. NPL ratio increased to 6.2% from KES 4.1% reported in 3Q17. Guidance for the FY17 NPL ratio is 6.0%. Loan loss provision increased by 31.7% y/y to KES 2.6bn. Operating expenses (excl. loan loss provisions) declined by 3.3% y/y to KES 14.7bn. PBT declined by 9.8% y/y to KES 13.7bn – below our expectation of a PBT of KES 13.95bn. Co-op Bank now trades at a trailing P/E ratio of 8.2x and a P/B ratio of 1.4x.
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