South Africa Reserve Bank Will Take Its African Bank Stake Public

The South African Reserve Bank on Tuesday (March 22) announced plans to launch an initial public offering (IPO) for its 50% stake in small lender African Bank Holdings Ltd (ABHL) after it decided not to sell its share to investors, none of which were considered “suitable” to buy out SARB.

Officials from the nation’s central bank took control of ABHL in 2014 after it handed out a slew of bad loans and has been looking to sell its investment since early 2020, according to a Reuters report.

SARB will launch the IPO when market conditions feel the most promising, it said. Market volatility triggered by the ongoing Russian attacks on Ukraine have made many companies pull back on their plans to take their companies public, the report says.

South African lenders FirstRand and Standard Bank and a government employee pension fund are among the other investors in African Bank Holdings.

Related: Regional Central Bank Alliances May Shape the Digital Dollar’s Future

Earlier this month, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and four central banks completed trials of two blockchain-based platforms on which a multinational central bank digital currency (CBDC) technical standard could be based.

The goal of Project Dunbar — which includes the central banks of Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and South Africa — as well as a number of commercial banks, was to delve into the governance, processes and technology needed to make that happen.

Also read: Meta Faces Fines for Allegedly Violating Anti-Competition Rules in South Africa

In other news from South Africa, its competition regulator is seeking to prosecute Meta Platforms, formerly Facebook, and its subsidiaries, WhatsApp Inc and Facebook South Africa, for abusing its dominance in the social media sector.

The Competition Commission has referred the complaint to the Competition Tribunal for action. If Meta is found to have violated the country’s anti-competition rules, the social media giant would be fined 10% of the firm’s revenues earned in the Republic and its exports from the preceding year.

The Commission alleges that Facebook has expressed its intention to offboard GovChat and #LetsTalk, a tech startup that connects government and residents via the WhatsApp Business Application Programming Interface (API) and that the company has imposed or selectively enforced terms regulating access to the WhatsApp Business API’s data.