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Russia-Africa summit to improve security, economic ties: Convener

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The forum will be held in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the Expo Forum Convention and Exhibition Centre from July 27 to 28.

The convener of the Second Russia–Africa Economic and Humanitarian Summit will bolster ties between Russia and Africa in security, sustainable economic and humanitarian development.

Anton Kobyakov, an adviser to President Vladimir Putin and executive secretary of the organising committee for the Russia–Africa events, said this on Wednesday.

Mr Kobyakov, in its programme schedules, said the summit would create the basis for establishing powerful, prosperous and safe regions in new realities.

The forum will be held in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the Expo Forum Convention and Exhibition Centre from July 27 to 28.

He said, “The summit programme includes more than 30 panel sessions and thematic events on the most important issues involving cooperation between Russia and African states. African countries will obviously play an increasingly important role in the emerging architecture of a multipolar world.”

Mr Kobyakov added that the summit’s business programme consists of four major thematic pillars encompassing all cooperation areas between Russia and Africa.

“During the panel discussions of the ‘Cooperation in Science and Technology’ pillar, experts will discuss collaboration between Russia and Africa in advanced technologies,” stated Mr Kobyakov. “The key themes of the pillar are how industrial cooperation leads to technological sovereignty and advanced technologies for Africa’s sustainable development.”

He said events on the sidelines of the Russia–Africa Economic and Humanitarian Forum would include the Media Forum, the Congress of University Rectors and a roundtable.

Nigeria, other developing countries face $4 trillion SDGs investment gap: UN

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According to a new UNCTAD report, developing countries like Nigeria face a staggering four trillion-dollar gap in sustainable development investments.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has warned that a green future would remain out of reach if the world does not help developing countries close a two trillion-dollar gap in investment toward an energy transition.

According to a new UNCTAD report, developing countries like Nigeria face a staggering four trillion-dollar gap in sustainable development investments.

The UNCTAD secretary general, Rebeca Grynspan, said a significant increase in material support for renewable energy in developing countries was crucial for the world to reach its climate goals by 2030.

While investment in renewables has nearly tripled since adopting the Paris Agreement almost eight years ago, poorer nations have been largely left out.

Ms Grynspan said more than 30 developing countries had not registered a single international investment in utility-size renewable energy generation since the landmark climate change treaty was adopted in 2015.

According to UNCTAD, the amount of foreign direct investment in clean energy attracted by developing countries in 2022 stood at $544 billion — well below needs.

Some good news from the report is that energy companies among the top 100 multinationals have been increasingly turning toward renewables and divesting fossil fuel assets at about 15 billion dollars per year.

However, the report shows an overall slower pace of investment in renewable energy in 2022 “as international project finance deals declined.”

In developing countries, the largest gaps in Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs)-related investments were in energy, water and transport infrastructure, UNCTAD said.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is also on the decline, according to UNCTAD, as global flows fell by 22 per cent in 2022 to $1.3 trillion, while in Least Developed Countries, the vast majority of which are in Africa, FDI inflows dropped by as much as 16 per cent.

UNCTAD’s report says that the slowdown was driven by “overlapping crises”: the war in Ukraine, high food and energy prices and debt pressures.

With these factors still in play during 2023, the agency expects “downward pressure on global FDI” to continue this year.

The report calls for a series of policies and financing mechanisms to be put in place to help developing countries attract necessary investments. UNCTAD stressed the importance of debt relief for developing economies to provide them with the fiscal space needed for clean energy spending and to help lower country risk ratings, a prerequisite for attracting private investment.

The agency also recommended reducing the cost of capital for clean energy investment through partnerships between international investors, the public sector and multilateral financial institutions – a measure that can reduce the spread on borrowing costs for energy investment projects in developing countries by up to 40 per cent.

Ms Grynspan insisted that investment played a “huge part” in achieving the SDGs.

She said they were simply “too big to fail,” calling them “the only game in town,” which requires collective action and global solidarity.

Alleged corrupt politicians, businesspeople hiding ill-gotten wealth in France real estate: Transparency International

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Time and again, foreign politicians and businesspeople allegedly involved in or convicted of financial crimes have been revealed to own luxury properties in France.

New in-depth analysis finds unacceptable level of money laundering risk in French real estate, despite transparency measures
Non-compliance, incomplete data and loopholes are creating a brick wall for attempts to follow flows of dirty money into French real estate, according to a new report by Transparency International France, Transparency International and Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC). Six years after France began collecting information on the beneficial owners of companies, almost a third of legal entities in France have failed to comply. Partly as a consequence, more than 7.33 million parcels of land – which could contain one or multiple properties – in France are anonymously held. This effectively creates a dead-end for efforts to follow the money of white-collar criminals, kleptocrats and sanctioned elites into French real estate, which is known to be a favoured destination for corrupt cash.

The report, Behind a Wall: Investigating Company and Real Estate Ownership in France, is based on an in-depth analysis of publicly available records on French-registered companies and real estate. The authors scraped roughly five million individual web pages containing company information from France’s company beneficial ownership register and cross-referenced the results with data from the French cadastre, or land registry plan.

The analysis returned alarming results. More than 1.53 million legal entities registered in France – just under a third – have not declared who ultimately owns and benefits from them, despite being required to do so since 2017. Nearly 10.35 million parcels – the smallest unit of the cadastre – across France are owned by private legal entities. Yet, in 7.33 million of these, the real owners remain unknown. The vast majority of these companies did not provide data on their real owners or did not appear in France’s beneficial ownership register at all. The latter may include foreign companies, which can own real estate in France without registering a French company that would be subject to transparency requirements. As a result, 71 per cent of all corporate-owned French parcels are anonymously held.

Despite the high number of companies failing to comply with beneficial ownership disclosure rules, only one criminal sanction has been imposed between 2016 and 2020, French authorities confirmed to the report’s authors. Authorities in France have presented slightly different compliance figures, but researchers have been unable to independently verify the government’s numbers.

Sara Brimbeuf, head of the illicit financial flows programme at Transparency International France, said: “Fifteen years after the start of the first ‘ill-gotten gains” cases in France, and at a time when tracking down the real estate assets of Russian PEPs and oligarchs is supposed to be a priority, it is unacceptable that more than two-thirds of corporate-owned real estate is anonymously held. We call on the authorities to quickly close loopholes, improve data collection and verification, and sanction companies that continue to keep their owners secret.“

The research also highlighted issues of data quality and completeness in the French beneficial ownership register. For example, historical data is not included, meaning that individuals expecting to come under scrutiny can disappear from the register by transferring ownership of their company to a relative.

Maíra Martini, research and policy expert on corrupt money flows at Transparency International, said: “We have known for a long time that luxury French real estate is hot property for criminals and the corrupt looking to stash and clean their ill-gotten gains. Transparency measures of recent years should have been game-changing, but we have a long way to go to ensure that these tools achieve their full potential. The authorities should scale up their fight against money laundering through the real estate sector, and bring data collection and reporting requirements in-step with the level of risk.”

Parallel investigations by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) have revealed more than a dozen properties in France linked to alleged money launderers, politicians accused of corruption and their relatives from across Latin America.

Additionally, the authors of Behind a Wall were able to identify 166 Russian persons of public interest listed in the French beneficial ownership registry, including Russian politicians, businesspeople, bureaucrats, journalists as well as their close family relatives. Almost half of their companies are société civile immobilière – a legal arrangement often used to purchase real estate properties in France. The Russian-owned companies were more than twice as likely to be registered at a “mass address”: a key red flag in the company formation process. The companies own parcels of land with properties ranging from villas in Saint-Tropez to ski chalets in the Alps and luxury apartments in the many of Paris’s most glamorous arrondissements.

David Szakonyi, co-founder of Anti-Corruption Data Collective, said: “The fact that journalists and researchers could identify these persons of interest and their properties in France speaks to the importance of having this information freely accessible in the public domain. Unfortunately, our analysis suggests that these cases could be merely the tip of a corruption iceberg. With so many companies failing to declare who controls and benefits from them, investigators will keep running into a wall until the compliance rate comes up and data completeness and accuracy issues in the register are fixed.”

Transparency International France, Transparency International and ACDC recommend that the French authorities move quickly to increase the cost of non-compliance, and improve their own data collection and verification mechanisms. They should also address money laundering risks associated with specific company types, the real estate sector and foreign companies.

Sterling Financial Holdings Company Plc Appoint Directors

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Sterling Financial Holdings Company Plc wishes to notify of the appointment of new directors to its Board. The approval of the Central Bank of Nigeria has been obtained for the appointment of the following directors:

1. Yemi Adeola (Chairman) – Mr. Yemi Adeola has over 35 years of experience in banking, finance, law, and corporate consultancy. He worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers as a Consultant, Legal and Corporate Advisory Services at Citibank, Nigeria where he rose to the position of Executive Director, Public Sector, and Infrastructure Banking. Mr. Adeola was the former Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Sterling Bank from 2007 – 2018. He also served as the Deputy Managing Director in Trust Bank of Africa Ltd from 2003 – 2005. He is currently the Chairman of Lennox & Blair Group and a partner at Adeyemi Adeola & Co. Commercial Arbitrators and Legal Consultants. Mr. Adeola holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Obafemi Awolowo University, is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria, Member Chartered Institute of Arbitration (CIARB) and Member, Board of Trustees, Association of Banks’ Legal Advisers and Company Secretaries (ABLACS). He is an alumnus of Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, University of Oxford, and the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a John F. Kennedy Scholar.

2. Yemi Odubiyi (GMD/CEO) – Mr. Odubiyi started his banking career with the Nigeria unit of Citibank as an Operations & Technology Generalist serving across all its Operations and Technology functions and was thereafter enrolled in its Management Associate program undertaking stints across all key units of the Bank. He left Citibank to join the turnaround team of the then Trust Bank of Africa in 2003 as Head of Operations & Technology. Upon the consolidation of Trust Bank into Sterling Bank Plc, Yemi served as pioneer Group Head, Trade Services. In 2008, he was mandated to build the Structured Finance Group and also assumed oversight for corporate strategy serving as Chief Strategy Officer. Mr. Yemi Odubiyi served as the Executive Director, Corporate and Investment Banking at Sterling Bank Limited from February 2015 to June 2023. He holds a bachelor’s degree in estate management and a master’s in international law from the University of Lagos. He has undertaken senior PUBLIC management/executive education programs in Risk Management, Finance, and General Management at leading international educational institutions including the London and Harvard Business Schools.

3. Abubakar Suleiman (Non-Executive Director) – Mr. Abubakar Suleiman is a NonExecutive Director of Sterling Financial Holdings Company Plc and the MD/CEO of Sterling Bank Limited. He was appointed to the Board of Sterling Bank in April 2014 with responsibility for directly overseeing the Strategy & Innovation, Branding & Communication, and Human Resource Management Departments before assuming the role of the Managing Director. Mr. Suleiman joined the Sterling Bank family (Trust Bank of Africa) in 2003 with responsibility for Treasury and Finance. Following the merger in 2006, he was appointed Group Treasurer; a position he held until 2011 when he assumed the role of Integration Director – tasked with managing and integrating Equitorial Trust Bank (ETB) into Sterling. He began his career as an Experienced Staff Assistant at Arthur Andersen (now KPMG Nigeria), before moving to MBC International Bank (now First Bank) as a Management Associate. He later worked in Citibank Nigeria in roles spanning Treasury and Asset & Liability Management. Mr. Suleiman holds a degree in Economics from the University of Abuja and a master’s degree in Major Programme Management from the University of Oxford. He has attended various executive education programmes at INSEAD, Harvard, Wharton, and Said Business Schools.

4. Mr. Shola Adekoya (Non-Executive Director) – Mr. Adekoya is the Managing Director of STBFMC Limited and founder of Utterfresh Processing Limited, a thriving business in the Agricultural sector. He was the Chief Executive Officer of Konga Online Shopping, where he delivered the mandate to develop and execute the growth plan of three different entities. He also worked at Etisalat as the Head of the Planning & Budget Team. Mr Shola Adekoya has over 22 years of experience in the Technology, Fintech, Telecoms and Agricultural industries. He sits on the Boards of ULesson Nigeria & Delaware, BMac Apps and Zebaj Recycling in Non-Executive and Advisory capacities. He is a fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants. Mr Shola Adekoya holds an OND in Financial Studies and a B. Sc in Business Studies from the London Bank South University.

5. Ms. Aisha Bashir (Independent Non-Executive Director) – Ms. Aisha Bashir is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Cam Dairy Foods Limited. Prior to her role in Cam Dairy Foods, she was a consultant with Mountain Hazelnuts, a hazelnut company in Bhutan, where she developed guidelines for deploying mobile payments solutions to farmers for payment for hazelnuts. She was also a Special Assistant to the President/Chief Executive of Dangote Group where she worked on business strategy and supported the Chief operating Officer in corporate finance activities and led financial, operational and strategic due diligence on subsidiaries. She was a co-founder, Head, Product Development and Operations of PAGA, a pioneer Nigerian mobile payments company. She also worked as a business analyst at Accenture. PUBLIC Ms. Aisha Bashir holds a Master of Business Administration from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business, Master of Science in Environment and Resources – Land Use and Agriculture from Stanford University, School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences and Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in International Relations also from Stanford University.

6. Mrs. Eniye Ambakederemo (Independent Non-Executive Director) Mrs. Eniye Ambakederemo has over 29 years’ experience in the public and private sectors, banking, asset management, and investment and economic empowerment with practical executive management experience in various sectors including agriculture, production and manufacturing, finance and administration, policy development and execution. She rose to the rank of Director General of the Bayelsa State partnership initiation agency and the State investment promotion office. She was also a pioneer Board member of Asset Management Company of Nigeria (AMCON). Prior to her service in the public sector, she was a Branch Manager (Strategic Business Unit) United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc between 2009 – 2012. She was also the Head of Corporate Banking (South Bank) United Bank for Africa (UBA) between 2008-2009. She is a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Management (Chartered), the Institute of Chartered Economists of Nigeria and the Institute of Fraud Examiners. She is also a member of the International Business Innovation Association (INBIA). She is passionately involved in the turnaround of ailing companies and the development and mentoring of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises. She holds a BSc and an MBA in Accounting from the University of Port Harcourt. She is a Nigeria alumnus of the United Nations University of Peace. She has attended several management courses at Harvard and other prestigious institutions.

7. Mr. Olayinka Oni (Executive Director) – Prior to his appointment he was the Chief Digital Officer at Sterling Bank Limited where he led the execution of the Bank’s digital strategy. Before Sterling Bank, he was the Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft Nigeria where he was responsible for ensuring that the subsidiary had the right relevance in society and with the Federal Government. He also helped to generate policies and programs that created a more sustainable ICT environment for the organization. Before joining Microsoft, Mr. Oni had spent over 15 years in the ICT Industry. He previously served as the CIO/GM IT & Operations at Wema Bank Plc. He was also an Experienced Manager with the Nigerian practice at Accenture- a global management consulting firm. He was a co-convener of the CIO Nexus, a forum of all CIOs in Nigeria, and the current chairman of the CIO Forum of Banks in Nigeria. Mr. Oni is a graduate of Agric Economics from the University of Ilorin. He is an Honorary Senior Member of the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria (HCIB). His domain expertise includes solutions engineering, Program Management, Enterprise Architecture, and IT Governance. Over the course of his career, Mr. Oni has undertaken senior management/executive education programs in Business PUBLIC Strategy, Financial Acumen, Digital Transformation, and General Management at leading international educational institutions including Harvard, Said Business School (Oxford University), INSEAD, MIT, and a Cycle 24 participant of the globally acclaimed international master’s Program for Managers.

Coronation Insurance Plc Proposes Delisting as its Majority Shareholders Offer a Buyout

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Coronation Insurance Plc has notified that Coronation Capital (Mauritius) Limited on behalf of itself and other related parties, (together, the “Core Shareholders”) have approached the Board of Directors of the Company with an intention to acquire the shares held by other shareholders of Coronation Insurance, at an offer price of 65 Kobo per share, and subsequently delist the Company from NGX.

The offer price of 65 Kobo represents a premium of 30% to the Company’s share price of 50 Kobo on August 12, 2021, being the last traded price prior to the offer date.

It is intended that the Proposed Transaction will be implemented under a Scheme of Arrangement in line with section 715 of the Companies and Allied Matters Act, No.3 of 2020 (as amended) and other applicable rules and regulations.

The Proposed Transaction is subject to the review and clearance of the regulators as well as the approval of the shareholders of the Company. The terms and conditions of the Proposed Transaction will be provided in the Scheme Document which will be dispatched to all shareholders upon the convening of a General Meeting of the Company pursuant to an order by the Federal High Court. If the conditions of the Proposed Transaction are satisfied and same is sanctioned by the Court, the Company would be delisted from NGX.

Further developments will be communicated to shareholders in due course. Coronation Insurance’s shareholders and members of the public are advised to exercise caution in dealing in Coronation Insurance’s shares until further information is provided.