The AfDB Group's Board of Directors has approved a total AfDB loan of €98.06 million to finance a program of the regional airline, Air Côte d’Ivoire (ACI) to modernize and expand its operations. The loan consists of a €51.16 million sovereign loan, a €42.64 million private sector loan, and an African Development Fund (ADF) loan of €4.26 million.
More than 800,000 companies in Nigeria, including government contractors, have never paid any taxes, Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun has revealed.
In a statement, she also said that only 14 million Nigerians, out of an economically active base of 70 million, paid taxes.
Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal and the Seychelles have informed the FiTI Secretariat of their desire to join the Fisheries Transparency Initiative (FiTI).
On the model of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), FiTI is a code of conduct involving States, civil society, development partners and operators in the fisheries sector that provides for the publication of all national legislation on and all contracts related to the fisheries sector.
As the most robust economy in Central Africa, Cameroon, has in the past decade taken steps to further boost growth, making major advances in providing health, education, and clean water, and launching an ambitious infrastructure investment programme to become a middle-income country by 2035, according to the AfDB’s Cameroon Country Brief released on 2 November 2017.
At the beginning of September, Ghana’s Ministry of Finance brought the heads of State-owned Enterprises (SOEs) to deliberate how to reform SOEs, some of them loss-making, in order to have them play a more strategic role in Ghana’s development.
As reported in the local press, the Vice President of Ghana, Mahamadu Bawumia (who gave the keynote address to the Policy and Governance Forum) was very candid in his directive: “Share with government not your many challenges, which we all know [about], but your strategies,” he is reported to have said, referring to strategies for ensuring financial discipline, for exploring access to new sources of capital, and for improving commercial viability.
Two Kenya Airways cabin crew members have been arrested on suspicion of trying to smuggle drugs out of the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in the capital, Nairobi.
Mauritius has been ranked the topmost country on the continent in the latest World Bank ease of doing Business report. The country occupied the 25th position out of 190 countries.
Nigeria’s Justice Minister Abubakar Malami, has said that the country recently recovered $85 million of stolen assets from the UK. He claimed the money is linked to the Malabu scandal, a major case of alleged bribery involving oil giants Shell and ENI.
The Malabu scandal is one of the biggest corruption cases to hit Nigeria’s oil industry. Investigators in Nigeria and in Italy claim that $1.1bn – which was paid to the government by international oil companies in 2006 – never made it into the national coffers.
