Dangote Loses $3.7billion on Plunging Naira

Nigerian billionaire and Africa’s richest person, Aliko Dangote, fell 25 places on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index on Monday as the naira tumbled on its first day of trading without a peg to the United States dollar.

Dangote’s fortune fell $3.7 billion, knocking him to No. 71 on the Bloomberg ranking, down from No. 46 on Friday.

The majority of Dangote’s $12.7 billion fortune is derived from a 91 per cent stake in Dangote Cement Plc, which shed two per cent in trading Monday.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) began auctioning dollars to limit the currency’s decline.

The bank had been using capital controls to stem an outflow of dollars after the naira crashed in February 2015 when oil prices slumped.

Dangote’s slide came as equity markets worldwide surged on hopes that British voters would choose to remain in the European Union.

The upswing lifted the collective net worth of the 400 billionaires on the index by $44 billion to $3.99 trillion.

Amancio Ortega, Europe’s richest person, French luxury billionaire Bernard Arnault and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos led with respective daily gains of $2 billion, $1.4 billion and $1.1 billion.

After Dangote, the secondbiggest drop belonged to US casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, whose Las Vegas Sands fell 5.6 per cent along with other gambling stocks after reports that revenue was trending downward.

Adelson, who lost $1.1 billion Monday, is the world’s 29th-richest person with $23.3 billion.