Angola: Carrinho Group buys BCI for USD 29.3 million
With no experience in the financial sector, the Leonor Cart group, which stands out in the food sector, bought the Bank of Commerce and Industry (BCI) for around US$28 million.
The names of the competitors were not revealed, it is only known that the auction took place this Tuesday morning, at the premises of the Ministry of Finance, in Luanda.
With the sale, the State no longer has costs, said the Secretary of State for Finance, Otoniel dos Santos, who also informed the press that the deal exceeded expectations, by more than 2 million dollar.
The Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Institute for the Management of State Assets and Participations (IGAPE), Patrício Vilar, explained the reasons that led to the non-publication of the second competitor to buy the bank.
“On the stock exchange we don’t know who is bidding, we only know who bought. It’s natural for it to be like that”, he justified.
“Heinous crime”, classified journalist Nelson Francisco Sul, to whom he sells at a “banana price” by BCI, reveals that with João Lourenço “Angola faces a new plague of looting”.
“Since 2019, when the President of the Republic inaugurated the company’s industrial complex, located in the coastal province of Benguela, there have been several financial injections and sovereign guarantees from the State, signed by João Lourenço, in favor of Grupo Cart. Selling a bank worth more than $600 at a price of USD 28 million is a heinous crime”, wrote the journalist on the social network Facebook.
The Cart group is one of the business groups that have benefited the most from guarantees from the Angolan government.
The last one was used to cover the contract for importing goods and equipment for the sugar production factory in Benguela. In March of this year, it had already benefited from another guarantee for financial coverage of the contract to import goods and equipment for its plant producing equipment for cooking oil and soy flour, in the amount of 56.9 million euros.