All writing.
Occasional notes on sovereign debt, commodities, defence and trade finance. Filed from London, written for principals.
29 JUL 2026Sovereign Debt AdvisoryThe 2026 Eurobond window: what the first prints tell you about preparation
Sub-Saharan Africa raised close to six billion dollars in the opening weeks of 2026, the strongest start since 2013. The spread between the best and worst executions was wider than the credit differential justifies, and the reason is preparation.
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15 APR 2026Trade Finance & ReceivablesThe correspondent banking retreat from Africa
Western banks have been withdrawing from African correspondent relationships for fifteen years. The retreat is now functionally complete in most mid-tier markets, and the architecture that replaced it is a patchwork.
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18 MAR 2026CommoditiesCredit-wrapped distribution: a primer for African corporate flows
How credit insurance and balance-sheet partners convert corporate-credit-risk receivables into bankable assets, and the structural choices that decide whether a transaction prints.
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30 MAR 2026Trade Finance & ReceivablesThe ECOWAS4 trade finance gap, country by country
The IFC's 2022 West Africa Trade Finance Report quantified the gap for the four largest ECOWAS economies. Read alongside subsequent AfDB and country-level data, it remains the most precise picture of where the work needs to be done.
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22 MAR 2026Trade Finance & ReceivablesThe EU-Africa trade corridor: €370bn of flow, $81bn of unmet finance
The EU is Africa's largest trading partner; the bilateral merchandise relationship is large enough that the unfinanced share of it is one of the largest structural finance gaps anywhere in emerging markets.
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29 APR 2026Defence & Strategic IndustriesProgramme financing for the EU defence industrial base: what banks need to lend
Europe has committed to scaling its defence industrial base. Roughly half the capital required has to come from private banks. The structural reasons that has not yet happened are well understood; the practical fixes are starting to be.
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08 APR 2026Trade Finance & ReceivablesEURC and the CFA franc zone: a euro-pegged settlement rail for Francophone Africa
EURC volumes grew roughly two orders of magnitude in twelve months. The growth is not retail. The most plausible reading is that the CFA-EUR peg makes EURC structurally fit-for-purpose for Francophone African trade settlement, and that institutional users have noticed.
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10 MAY 2026Defence & Strategic IndustriesEurope's cotton-linter problem and the 155mm production target
European ammunition output is bottlenecked upstream by a single raw material that the public conversation has barely registered. The Chinese deliveries paused once already. Anyone planning to scale 155mm output without solving the linter question is planning on faith.
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22 APR 2026Defence & Strategic IndustriesNSPA, the ammunition support partnership, and the path from concept to bankable project
NATO has the procurement vehicle in place. What converts a strategic concept into a project a bank will fund is a specific sequence of commitments; the gap between the two is where most defence industrial-base ideas die.
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16 JUN 2026Defence & Strategic IndustriesThe gatekeepers turned out to be national: promotional banks and European defence lending
SAFE released the money. It did not answer the question of which defence borrowers a bank will actually fund. That question is now being settled by KfW, Bpifrance and BGK, with more precision than any instrument in Brussels.
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18 AUG 2026Sovereign Debt AdvisorySenegal's third way: reprofiling when restructuring is the obvious answer
Senegal is arguing that its debt problem is a maturity problem rather than a solvency problem. The distinction decides whether bondholders take a principal loss. It is the most consequential sovereign debt question in Africa this year.
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12 APR 2026Sovereign Debt AdvisorySovereign liability management: the 2026 African calendar
African sovereign Eurobond maturities concentrate in 2026 to 2028. For issuers still in working order, the question is not restructuring but how to refinance on terms that are commercially defensible and politically survivable.
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02 MAY 2026Trade Finance & ReceivablesStablecoins as African trade infrastructure: B2B, not retail
Sub-Saharan Africa received over $205 billion in on-chain value in the twelve months to June 2025. Stablecoins were 43 per cent of it. Most of the published commentary still treats this as a retail-crypto phenomenon. It is not.
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26 MAY 2026Trade Finance & ReceivablesRetiring the $81.8 billion figure: what the revised trade finance gap data says
We have used the African Development Bank's $81.8 billion estimate in our own writing. The revised measurement is lower, the direction of travel between 2019 and 2024 was the opposite of what most commentary assumes, and the forecast is worse. All three deserve saying plainly.
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08 JUL 2026CommoditiesOfftake instead of ownership: the Washington Accord and the bankability of resource-for-security
The United States is buying Congolese copper and cobalt through offtake and guarantees rather than equity. The structure is familiar to anyone who finances commodities. What is new is that the counterparty's access rests on a security undertaking.
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07 MAY 2026Trade Finance & ReceivablesWhy African trade finance is broken
The headline number is well-known: the African Development Bank estimates the continent's trade finance gap at $81.8 billion a year. The structural causes are less well-known, and they are not a single failure but four reinforcing ones.
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Sovereign Debt Advisory
Issuance, liability management and restructuring for sovereigns.
View practice→Origination & Offtake
Credit-wrapped distribution across hydrocarbons, softs and industrial materials.
View practice→Defence & Strategic Industries
Procurement and programme financing for sovereign and dual-use mandates.
View practice→Trade Finance & Receivables
Documentary, structured and ECA-backed structures for emerging-market flows.
View practice→