Ghana’s banks that were pushed into losses by a government debt revamp will return to profits this year, the country’s financial rescuer said.
(Bloomberg) — Ghana’s banks that were pushed into losses by a government debt revamp will return to profits this year, the country’s financial rescuer said.
Thanks to aggressive impairment accounting, the lenders limited most of the losses from a sovereign-debt exchange to last year’s financial statements, Eric Otoo, managing director of Ghana Amalgamated Trust, said in an interview. They did so even though the regulator had given them the choice to spread the costs over four years, said the head of the institution set up in 2018 to recapitalize select domestic banks.
Ghana’s ongoing restructuring of local-currency and overseas debt to qualify for a $3 billion International Monetary Fund bailout resulted in 16 out of the 23 banks posting 7.9 billion cedis ($673 million) loss before tax last year. That trend is already being reversed, with 20 of the banks reporting first-quarter profits, Otoo said.
“Because the banks were recapitalized by early 2020, the industry was in a much better position to withstand the shocks,” he said. “Barring any major unforeseen economic shock, we expect the banks to bounce back early to profit ways as the level of impairments drop substantially.”
Excluding National Investment Bank, which is yet to release full-year earnings, domestic banks reported 19.5 billion cedis of impairments in 2022, said Richmond Atuahene, an analyst at Salman Partners and Financial Consult Ltd. Among them, only state-owned Consolidated Bank Ghana Ltd. has shown capital distress, he said.
Absa Bank Ghana, the lender with the highest impairments of 2.1 billion cedis last year, wrote down only 168.1 million cedis in the first quarter through March.
Domestic debt restructuring may not be over yet, Toby Iles, the head of Middle East and Africa Sovereign Ratings at Fitch Ratings, said in an online briefing Thursday. The government is not honoring all payments on bonds that weren’t part of the debt exchange, raising the possibility of some of them being reorganized, he said. Those notes constitute about 35% of the old bonds, he said.
Separately, Otoo said Ghana Amalgamated Trust awaits the next court date in a case relating to its fund-raising plans. Its proposal to sell shares to the public to raise 800 million cedis and pay back the government’s seed money has been delayed by a suit by an opposition lawmaker.
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