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Newly established power investment platform New Sparta Energy (NSE) has announced three major appointments to senior management. David Anson joins as a director and head of development, Richard Scott as project director, and Camille Astier as legal director. The company is a subsidiary of New Sparta Asset Management, established in 2013 as a specialist emerging market investment manager and family office of Dr Jerome Booth, one of the founders of Ashmore Group.

Fuel distributor Petro Ivoire is seeking to raise €5m ($7m) with a bond issue on the NYSE Euronext market. The company listed a token 0.02% of its capital in Paris on 30 September, enabling it to issue the eight-year bond to fund an expansion of its business.

The New York-based International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) constituted a tribunal in March to hear the arbitration claim brought by Maersk Olie Algeriet against the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Algeria.

The Milan Public Prosecutor’s office has placed Royal Dutch Shell under formal investigation for international corruption offences relating to its purchase of OPL 245 in Nigeria. Shell’s headquarters in The Hague were searched on 17 February by Italian and Dutch financial police. The investigation relates to the sale in 2011 to Shell and Eni of the block, which contains the Etan and Zabazaba fields. The companies paid $1.1bn, plus a signature bonus of $200m, to the Nigerian government, which in a back-to-back deal negotiated by the attorney general then transferred $1.1bn to Malabu Oil & Gas, a company owned by former oil minister Dan Etete, to which he had granted rights to the acreage in 1998.

Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Toyota Tsusho Corporation have secured a contract from the Upper Egypt Electricity Production Company for the turnkey supply of equipment for the 1,950MW Helwan South power plant on the Nile River. The order, announced on 26 June, will entail the design, supply, installation and commissioning of supercritical pressure steam turbines, generators and condensers for the project’s three 650MW units. The value of the contract was not disclosed.

There is a growing international effort to revitalise the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP) as a key element in getting cross-border projects with a big regional impact off the ground. The World Bank is preparing a project to facilitate priority energy projects in the SAPP region. And the US Power Africa initiative – which is gaining momentum across the continent – has also made building up regional pools a priority. It is putting transaction advisers – embedded specialist consultants – into the SAPP, East African Power Pool (EAPP) and West African Power Pool (WAPP).

Despite efforts to shore up the oil price, oil majors are slashing capital expenditure, including cutting and cancelling planned spending in Africa, while independents are fighting for financial survival.The breakeven price for existing oil production in leading exporters Nigeria and Angola is $29/barrel and $32/barrel respectively, but these prices have not been reached despite a US-brokered agreement on 12 April between Saudi Arabia, Russia and other Opec+ producers to call off a disastrous price war.

Mineworkers’ pension fund The Metal Industries Benefit Funds Administrators (Mibfa) intends to invest R1bn ($112m) in projects bidding in South Africa’s renewable energy independent power producers procurement programme. The fund will provide debt finance to 10-15 solar or wind projects, administered by asset manager Mergence Investment Managers.

Engen Holdings is selling assets in ten countries outside South Africa to Vivo Energy Holding in a share transaction whose value was not disclosed. The deal will add nine new countries and more than 300 Engen-branded service stations to the Vivo network, taking Vivo Energy’s total presence to over 2,100 service stations across 24 African markets. The new markets for Vivo Energy included in the transaction are Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Réunion, Zambia, Gabon, Rwanda, Mozambique, Tanzania and Malawi.

A sale took place in Switzerland on 29 September of 25 supercars seized by Swiss authorities from vice-president Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, known as Teodorín, the son of the president. The cars were auctioned with no reserve on behalf of the State of Geneva by auction handlers Bonhams. The sale raised about CHF26m ($27m) in total, of which CHF23.4m will go to social projects in Equatorial Guinea.Swiss authorities seized the cars and ordered the sequestration of Teodorín’s yacht in 2016 following an investigation into money laundering and mismanagement of public assets.

Ruling Patriotic Front (PF) candidate Edgar Lungu has won the 20 January presidential election that followed the death of former leader Michael Sata. On a turnout of just 32%, Lungu narrowly beat rival Hakainde Hichilema of the United Party for National Development (UPND), taking 48.3% of the vote to Hichilema’s 46.7%. The former defence and justice minister has pledged to continue the development projects that began under his predecessor, with the power sector to remain a critical component of the government’s development plan.

Following concessions on the pricing of Algerian gas taken by Tunisia through the Trans-Mediterranean Gas Pipeline, Sonatrach and Société Tunisienne d’Electricité et de Gaz (Steg) have agreed to renew their offtake agreement through to 2027, with a possible extension of the contract to 2029. Unlike recent agreements with European clients, which have involved lower liftings, Sonatrach on 17 June said the draft agreement anticipated a 20% rise in the contracted volumes to be taken from 2025, “with a view to securing the expected increase in consumption in this strategic market”.

Cenpower Generation Company Limited announced the financial close of $900m of project finance for the Kpone independent power plant (IPP) at Tema on 3 October. The 350MW combined cycle gas turbine plant is due on stream in 2017 and will be energy-hungry Ghana’s largest private power scheme, accounting for some 10% of total installed capacity and 20% of available thermal generation capacity. Dutch development agency FMO contributed $200m, the rest was private equity and debt, including $425m of commercial debt raised by Rand Merchant Bank with South African export credit agency backing.

With tougher anti-bribery legislation in place in the US and UK, local partners have been identified as a key vulnerability. Foreign companies need them to help them navigate the local business environment, especially if it is government policy to develop local content.

The international board of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) has designated Mali as EITI compliant, bringing the total number of EITI compliant countries to 12, including five others in Africa.