South Africa is currently cast as the target market for several ventures exploiting gas fields either offshore or across its borders. Some doubt however that the country's as-yet largely unrealised gas sector will ever justify all of them, and key in the race to market is pinning down the local offtake commitments. Failure on the part of one major to do so has led to an eye-catching alternative. By Daniel O'Sullivan. One scheme that has made it to at least an initial encounter with the bank mark

BNP Paribas recently arranged a US$100m four-year revolving credit to fund the Nigerian operations of Addax Petroleum. The deal used an innovative new structure that could set a precedent for other upstream ventures in Africa. The loan is a hybrid, mixing elements of both the US and European versions of borrowing-base facilities with the kind of covenants and security seen on project and export-backed financings. By Daniel O'Sullivan. Addax Petroleum is one of the largest private oil producers i

The syndication for the US$280m commercial bank facilities for the Saudi Polyolefins Company (SPC) closed in January 2002. This marked the end of almost 18 months work in developing the financing structure following the issue of invitations to bid to potential arranging banks in August 2000. The long gestation period can largely be attributed to the the structure of the project that broke new ground for a project of this size and therefore acts as a useful illustration of how more and more futur

The Mid East has a range of now familiar development names. Links to the government are central to these companies but they have strong commercial instincts. By Rod Morrison. ADWEA Abu Dhabi Water & Electric Authority (ADWEA) has been a regular source of project finance related business over the last few years and will probably continue to be so. More power and water station sell-offs are planned, extra power and water capacity is needed and the utility is making its first tentative steps outsid

There are now more than 250 Islamic finance institutions throughout the world with estimated total assets of US$100bn. However until now, developers have been reluctant to utilise this ready source of finance because of a lack of familiarity with Islamic financing products and a presumption of incompatibility between Islamic finance and conventional finance. However, the reality is that many Islamic banks are now willing and able to participate on a pari passu basis with the international banks;

The Middle East project finance market had a good year last year, doubling in size in terms of debt raised to US$8.6bn from the figure in 2000. Much of this business was actually transacted after the events of September 11th, showing the market was able to withstand this shock and the initial nervousness of the international banks. A key factor in achieving this were the local and regional banks who are profiled at length in this article. By Rod Morrison. Indeed from Thomson Financial's project