Officials at the New Development Bank (NDB) have announced that the bank will be providing services to private clients with the hope of offering up a 30 percent share of its project portfolio to the private sector.
A senior executive at the bank, Zhu Xian who is the bank’s chief operating officer is reported by Reuters to have said that services to be provided to the private sector will primarily be loans.
New Development Bank (NDB) was set up by BRICS which is a group of major emerging economies namely, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
The bank is based in Shanghai, China and on Monday approved six new projects bringing its loan portfolio up to over $5.1 billion across 21 projects.
Zhu Xian is quoted by Reuters to have said that “In India and China, there’s very strong demand for sovereign…But on the other hand, some other countries for different reasons they probably prefer more non-sovereign lending.”
“Some countries they still have some sort of fiscal difficulties. Secondly, the debt sustainability is a concern. They don’t want to borrow too much in sovereign terms. So they prefer you do more market transactions,” he added.
Zhu told Reuters that the bank is hoping to capture the gap in the market especially in make available long-term loans with tenures of at least 10 years.
Brazil’s Petrobras has benefited from a $200 million loan from the NDB for an environmental protection scheme, while South Africa’s Transnet has also received a $200 million loan to reconstruct a port in Durban.
Source: Africafeeds.com
