Over $1 3.3 billion syndicated loans accessed by oil and gas firms in Nigeria between 2013 and 2018 are facing fresh threats.
The loans, mostly accessed from different banks’ consortia during $100 per barrel crude price regime, investigation by this newspaper showed, now suffer performance plunge of an average of $30 on every barrel of crude produced from specific acreages on which the loans were accessed to service.
The price of crude oil averaged $65 per barrel in the last one week.
While over $10 billion was raised by different banks as syndicated loans for the purchase of oil assets from Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, Eni and Total as they retreated from the country’s onshore industry, $3.3 billion in syndicated loan was accessed by Dangote for its $650,000 barrels per day refinery.
The oil companies that bought oilfields from these majors when oil was selling for over $100 a barrel have been hammered by the crash in prices while their troubles are taking a toll on the banking sector in Africa’s largest economy. Read more