Ghana fails to secure debt deal with international bondholders

JOHANNESBURG - Ghana has workablne failed to secure a debt deal with two bondholder groups in its push to restructure $13 billion of international bonds, the government said on Monday, in a blow to its efforts to swiftly emerge from default and economic crisis.

Formal talks were on hold for now after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) indicated that the deal would not fit its debt sustainability parameters, the government said in a statement.

“We will regroup to continue negotiations until we reach a deal that is consistent with IMF debt sustainability targets,” the office of Finance Minister Mohammed Amin Adam said on X, after the government had released its regulatory statement.

He said Ghana had reached an “interim deal” with bonddholders

but that needed to be tweaked to meet IMF targets.

Ghana had been in formal talks with two groups of bondholders since March 16 - a group of Western asset managers and hedge funds and another one including regional African banks.

The regional group had also rejected part of the proposed changes, including an option to retain the original value of the bonds with a longer maturity and lower coupon.

In December 2022, Ghana defaulted on most of its $30 billion external debt as it fell into economic crisis.

The economy of the world’s second biggest cocoa producer has since started to recover, with 2023 growth of 2.9 percent exceeding the IMF’s 2.3 percent forecast from January.

In its official statement, Ghana’s government said it was working on satisfying the IMF’s requirements.

Regional bondholders believe a deal is possible before the end of the year given the Ghanaian economy is performing better than assumed in the IMF’s original analysis, Samuel Sule, Chief Executive Officer at Renaissance Capital Africa and financial advisor to the group, said.

The IMF approved a $3 billion, three-year loan programme for Ghana in May 2023, contingent on the government implementing reforms and finishing a debt restructuring that the fund deems sustainable.

The government said the IMF had assessed the proposed bondholder deal based on its first review of the loan programme, which was completed in January. IMF staff has already reached an agreement on the second review, which is just pending the Fund’s executive board sign-off.

“IMF staff has determined that this working scenario is not in line with programme parameters,” an IMF spokesperson said by email, adding the fund continued to support the ongoing restructuring talks.

An advisor to the international bondholder committee said in a statement that restructuring discussions would continue this week.

Ghana - together with Zambia and Ethiopia - is reworking its debt under the G20 Common Framework, a process set up during the Covid-19 pandemic to speed up debt overhauls. –