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The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has finally implemented a 2010 law requiring oil, gas and mining companies listed on US exchanges to disclose payments to host governments.

Nigeria’s new sovereign wealth fund is a potentially positive development that will be keenly watched by global markets and by investors in Africa’s second biggest economy, but observers are cautious, writes Kevin Godier.

Heritage Oil Corporation has dropped plans for a rights issue to fund its acquisition of a stake in Nigeria’s OML 30 after receiving a cash boost from Genel Energy. Genel will buy a 26% stake in the Miran Block in Iraqi Kurdistan for $156m, and has agreed a $294m exchangeable loan. The Miran farm-in is part of a buying spree that has also seen the company farm into acreage in Malta and Morocco.

The amicable resolution reached in March of the arbitration dispute between Sonatrach and Anadarko Petroleum Corporation over a windfall tax introduced in 2006-07 is moving ahead.

The Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA), a joint initiative of the Danish government and the Energy, Environment and Climate Change Department of the African Development Bank (AfDB), has approved its first grant of $825,000 for the concept phase of the Green Tech Financial Facility.

Mining gold from the hillsides in north-east Guinea poses huge challenges for investors and the community alike, underlining the need to tackle a range of sensitive issues and manage expectations in long ignored regions of highly under-developed economies, writes Thalia Griffiths, recently in Lero.

Heritage Oil has published details of a $370m rights issue to part-finance its acquisition of a stake in Nigeria’s OML 30 (AE 235/18). The rights issue could see chief executive Tony Buckingham reducing his 33% stake in the company, as maintaining his stake at that level would cost him some $122m.

Economy minister Emmanuel Nganou Djoumessi signed loan agreements on 31 July for a total of CFA105bn ($194m) from the World Bank and Agence Française de Développement (AFD) for the $494m Lom Pangar dam development

Kenya has won praise for creating a good environment for private power investment, but its ambitious expansion plans will need a range of energy sources and managing this process is a complex business

South Sudan is proud of its ability to survive so far without oil income, but the strategy is by no means sustainable and the assumptions about non-oil revenues in the government’s new austerity budget may not be realised, writes Richard Nield, recently in Juba

Few countries in sub-Saharan Africa have impressed investors, donors and governments as much as President Paul Kagame’s Rwanda. With a development strategy crafted in co-ordination with advisers such as former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s Africa Governance Initiative, Kagame has rebuilt Rwanda, making Kigali one of Africa’s best-functioning capitals and attracting infrastructure and other commercial investments. As one long-time Central Africa-watcher expresses it: “Rwanda has taken the uniquely organised structures of the pre-colonial Tutsi kingdoms and transposed that to a modern state.”

The temporary closure by protesters of three oil terminals, which caused a fall in exports of 300,000 b/d over two days in early July, is likely to reoccur, according to European security and diplomatic sources

The World Bank Group has activated $300m of additional credit support for power sector reform and gas development projects, including a SDR64.5m ($100m equivalent) loan for transmission and distribution infrastructure, and International Development Association partial risk guarantees (PRGs) worth $200m to support Niger Delta Power Holding Company’s gas supply and aggregation agreements with Shell Petroleum Development Company, Chevron Nigeria Ltd and other oil companies.

Record electricity consumption in mid-July has highlighted the basic weaknesses of beleaguered state utility Sonelgaz as it seeks to attract international support for its ambitious investment programme, writes Oualid Khelifi

Rating agency Moody’s Investors Service lowered Eni’s long-term corporate credit rating to A3 (outlook negative) from A2 on 16 July. It also lowered the company’s short-term credit rating to P-2 from P-1.