Last week in brief...We lead this week with the notable news of a deal for the African unit of a global engineering consulting business by two black women-owned firms. Motseng Group and Malani Padayachee & Associates, an engineering consulting group, have agreed to acquire Mott MacDonald Africa. The female founders and CEOs of each of the acquirers take on new roles in the business which has been renamed MPAMOT; Ipeleng Mkhari, Motseng's CEO will Chair of MPAMOT's board while Malani Padayachee-Saman will be MPAMOT's Chief Executive.
It will come as no surprise that the COVID-19 pandemic is having a depressing effect on deal values. Evaporating consumer demand and continued uncertainty have clouded the outlook for most businesses which is reflected in the prices investors are paying for their stakes. This week, Grand Parade Investments advised its shareholders that it has renegotiated the terms of the sale of Burger King South Africa along with its supplier of meat patties to Emerging Capital Partners, agreeing to a reduction of 15% on the initial price agreed earlier this year.
In another sale, although of a smaller order of magnitude, Mayflower Capital Investments has agreed to acquire Kilimapesa Gold from listed gold producer Goldplat in an all-share deal. The Goldplat subsidiary owns the assets and licences of the AIM-listed company's Kenyan underground mining operation. Both parties aim to enter into a formal agreement for the transaction by the end of September, and, in the meantime will loan up to $450,000 between them, interest-free, to Kilimapesa so the firm can restart the treatment of artisanal tailings at its processing plant.
Fresh from holding its first close two weeks ago, new venture capital fund Entrepreneurs for Entrepreneurs Africa announced the first of two investments it indicated its investment committee had already reviewed and approved. The investee company is Enlabeler, an artificial intelligence and data annotation startup based in South Africa.
PROPARCO is making a loan to Kenya Nut Company, an almost 50-year family-run company. The $18.7 million loan will be used to finance Kenya Nut's development plan as well as meet some short-term cashflow needs caused by the global coronavirus pandemic.
There was quite a lot of movement on the people front last week. Public Investment Corporation, manager of South Africa's Government Employees Pension Fund, has reinstated the role of Chief Investment Officer. The position was eliminated six years ago as part of a reorganization that split the responsibilities of the role between four investment heads. While the recruitment process for the reconstituted position plays out, the PIC board has appointed Sholto Dolamo, the organization's Executive Head for Research and Projects Development to the role on an interim basis.
African Infrastructure Investment Managers' CEO Jurie Swart is retiring, and the firm is promoting two of its senior executives to the position of joint-managing directors to replace him. The two executives, Vuyo Ntoi and Sola Lawson, will remain in the infrastructure investment firm's Cape Town and Lagos offices, both key markets in sub-Saharan Africa. Both have been with the investment manager for a number of years.
And finally, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former President of Liberia, is joining DFC's Development Advisory Council, a newly constituted 9-person body that advises the USA's new development finance institution on the ways to increase the positive impact of the organization's activities.
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
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El CDTI Innovación, a través de su programa Innvierte, conjuntamente...
