Last week in brief... Two publicly-listed companies were targets of private equity interest in Africa last week. The larger of the two, if it comes off, is based in South Africa. Capitalworks, a private equity firm has submitted a bid to acquire Peregrine Holdings and delist it from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The amount of money being offered is significant and would make it one of the larger deals of the year.
FIVE, AfricInvest's evergreen investment platform, is also making an investment in a publicly listed financial services business, this time in Rwanda. The deal, which is the fourth for FIVE, see the platform acquire the combined minority stakes in I&M Bank (Rwanda) owned by two development finance institutions; DEG and PROPARCO. The amount being invested has not been disclosed.
There was news of a significant debt fund close last week too. The Facility for Energy Inclusion, an Africa Development Bank anchored fund managed by LHGP Asset Management, announced that it had held its first close in December last year, earning commitments totaling $160 million from a group of development finance institutions and other investors The capital will be used to back IPPs developing gird, mini-grid and captive power projects, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Remaining with the renewable power sector, South African private equity firm Metier signed a joint development agreement on behalf of its latest fund with Tembo Power. The agreement sees the fund back Kaptis, a run-of-river hydropower project in Western Kenya, and secure the equity portion of the financing. The partners in the project can now go ahead and appoint the lenders to the project and bring it to financial close later this year.
In the venture space, the SA SME Fund is making an investment in Grindstone Accelerator, a structured entrepreneurship development program. The Accelerator, which is jointly owned by Knife Capital and Thinkroom Consulting, will use the R25 million (or about $1.5 million) to double the number of entrepreneurs it can accommodate, adding an additional 60 scale-up companies to its annual programs in Cape Town and Johannesburg in each of the next three years.
And finally, there were a number of senior-level job changes announced last week. BlueOrchard and Guernsey Finance each have a new CEO and responsAbility Investments has promoted one of its own to be its new COO.
That's it for this week. As always, you can review these and other stories by clicking through to this week's preview edition of the newsletter.
Allan Cunningham is a senior media executive who has spent the last 15 years of his career working for some of the world’s most respected M&A and Private Equity media companies including Dow Jones’s publications Private Equity Analyst and VentureWire and most recently, The Deal. He has built a number of successful digital and event content businesses, both subscription and sponsor-supported, delivering information and content-marketing services to clients in the M&A and broader deal ecosystem. He recently struck out on his own and launched Rowayton Press, a multi-platform media company focused on the private capital opportunities in emerging and frontier markets. Mr. Cunningham holds a Bachelors degree from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.
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