Paradise Papers: Ramaphosa’s Shanduka deal flop
Cyril Ramaphosa’s company got involved in an unfortunate Mozambican energy project that turned out to be a real tangle, with Appleby red-flagging a couple of the players along the way
In June 2012, the company owned by deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa trumpeted its entry into the regional energy market through a 37.5% stake in the Kuvaninga independent power producer project in southern Mozambique. This was two years before Ramaphosa had been picked as deputy president to Jacob Zuma, and before he sold out of Shanduka. SA’s largest investment company, the Public Investment Corp (PIC), which manages R1.8 trillion in government pensioners’ money, would also later invest in the project. In the early days, Investec, the SA bank headed by CEO Stephen Koseff, was the main funder. The bank spoke of the need to adopt "flexibility" and "guerrilla tactics" to succeed at Kuvaninga. Investec’s finance team wrote that the Mozambiquan market was "not necessarily at first sympathetic to project finance principles". This is why "locking in a strong and active local partner with a suitably aligned interest" was vital. But perhaps of more concern was that the deal was to be struct...
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