Financing for Africa’s power sector has chiefly been characterised by delays, but transactions banked over the past year have heightened hopes for a growing deal flow, writes Kevin Godier.

While many financial institutions are turning to the state for support in difficult times, Actis, the privatised private equity company, is less and less reliant on state money, and is raising record amounts of private capital. Julian Evans meets its senior partner, Paul Fletcher. 

Belarus’ Soviet-style government is struggling to cope with the credit crunch, and is trying to make friends with the west, including seeking a US$2bn emergency loan from the IMF. But negotiations with the fund are not proving easy.

The CEE real estate market is being pummeled by the global financial crisis, but the outlook is not entirely gloomy, as Geoffrey Smith discovers.

It’s a sure sign that things are bad when Russian businesses, generally more used to browbeating journalists, start begging them for help.
 

The Middle East has been less severely affected by the global financial crisis because of many governments’ enormous reserves of petro-dollars. But banking systems have still been hit. Some banks have coped better than others.

For most of 2008, bankers in the Middle East were looking on the troubles of their western peers with a mixture of wonder and schadenfreude. The credit crunch still seemed a mainly western affair, that could actually strengthen the relative position of Middle East banks and lead to their international expansion.

The Baltic economic miracle has turned out to be an illusion, reports Eva-Luise Schwarz. 

On November 3, Ilmars Rimsevics, governor of the Bank of Latvia, met with anxious investors in an emergency conference in London, and assured them that Latvia was not going the way of Iceland.