Angola will issue sovereign debt securities in foreign currency this year for a maximum amount of up to 1 billion USD on the Japanese market and up to 3 billion USD in Eurobonds, according to two orders published in the Diário da República this week.
With the accounts settled, the Angolan President has authorized the Minister of Finance, Vera Daves de Sousa, to begin the procedures for contracting up to 4,000 million USD in sovereign debt securities in foreign currency to finance the General State Budget.
This figure represents 55% of the 7.230 billion USD that the government included in the 2025 Annual Debt Plan (PAE) in external financing to fund the State Budget. Within this amount, it was planned to raise 1.5 billion USD in Eurobonds, a figure that is now expected to be doubled, which for an economist consulted by Expansão, who requested anonymity, is a sign that if “the State Budget was practically just a piece of paper with letters and then it was worthless, because what was there was never fulfilled, the same is true of the Annual Debt Plan”.
The documents do not explain why the amounts are double what is provided for in the PAE, but Presidential Order 76/25 of February 24 states that this issue will be made under the Global Medium Term Program, the same program used at the end of 2024 for the contingent issue of 1.9 billion USD in Eurobonds, which served as a guarantee for J.P. Morgan’s financing of 1 billion USD to the country.
As this is a contingent issue, it is not included in the Angolan debt stock, but will only be if Angola defaults on its obligations to J.P. Morgan, but according to the budget execution report for the third quarter of 2024, at the end of September the country’s debt to external private investors was 9,114 million USD.
As for going to the Japanese market, Vera Daves de Sousa had already said, when the 2025 State Budget proposal was submitted to the National Assembly, that this was a possibility. “Let’s see what opportunities there are in the Japanese market and others that seem interesting from the point of view of the cost-benefit ratio,” she said in November.
Lusa
