Bonny Gas (BG), a liquefied natural gas tanker owner and operator in Nigeria. BG signed a 20-year agreement to deliver gas to its U.S. gas marketing business based in Louisiana, United States. BG’s revenues, on which they will rely to service the loan, are also denominated in U.S. dollars, so the risk of a mismatch on the balance sheet is lower. Unicem’s (Nigeria) $210.6 million multitranche project financing facility, of which $57 million is dollar-denominated, set a new benchmark for naira-denominated project debt financing.<sup>23</sup> The Unicem loan was specially structured to address the mismatch between the company’s foreign-currency-denominated construction costs and the project income earned in local currency by enabling the company to pay its primary contractors in dollars accessed from the local market while the naira-denominated tranches served as a natural hedge for the company’s revenues earned in naira. Celtel Zambia’s loan, which comprised an $86 million kwacha-denominated tranche raised primarily from Zambian banks and international development finance institutions, was the largest locally raised kwacha and foreign-currency-denominated syndicated term loan with offshore participation arranged for a Zambian corporation to date.

Maturity terms for borrowers’ infrastructure loans in 2006 ranged from 4 to 13.7 years, with some variance by borrowing sector—longer overall than the 2.5 to 5 year range in 2005 and 5 to 10 years in 2000.<sup>**24**</sup> The longest available maturity terms in 2006 exceeded those for infrastructure borrowers in Malaysia (12 years) and were just over a year below those for infrastructure borrowers in Chile (15 years). The lending facilities for African telecoms concerns in 2006 were all arranged with five-year maturity terms (versus five to eight years for corresponding borrowers in Chile). Loans for firms in the focus countries’ shipping and water utilities sectors were arranged with longer maturities of 12 to 13.7 years. In addition to being uniquely structured to overcome the company’s particular foreign-exchange exposure, Unicem of Nigeria’s $210.6 million multitranche project financing facility is a landmark deal for the Nigerian corporate sector in that it has the longest maturity terms for naira-denominated syndicated loan facilities to date, with seven- and nine-year naira-denominated tranches and four- and seven-year dollar-denominated tranches.

South African-based borrowers in the telecoms sector also borrowed for five-year maturity terms, with the exception of a three-year, $1.5 billion tranche for Mobile Telephone Networks’s (MTN) $3.47 billion loan. The longest-tenor lending facility in 2006 for South African borrowers involved in infrastructure development, as tracked by Loanware, exceeded that of the other focus countries by several years: a 20-year loan for Trans African Concessions Pty Ltd, to refinance a facility signed in 1998 to support development of a Maputo Corridor Toll Road from South Africa to Mozambique. Forty-nine percent of South African corporate borrowing for infrastructure purposes was U.S.-dollar–denominated in 2006. The remainder was in local currency.

Although Dealogic reported no euro-denominated syndicated loans for infrastructure financing in the 24 focus countries, there were a few euro-denominated loans transacted bilaterally in 2005–06 in the water treatment and electrical utility sectors. In fact, reported loans arranged for borrowers in the water sector were all bilateral.<sup>25</sup> Development finance institutions were prominent in these bilateral transactions,

> 23 “African Industrial Deal of the Year 2006,” _Project Finance_ , March 1, 2007.

> 24 Maturity terms are not disclosed in the case of some loans, however.

> 25 Although Loanware is considered to be the most comprehensive dataset available for syndicated loan transactions, its dataset also includes bilateral loans where these are reported.

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