The country has complied with Community regulatory requirements for securing the reimbursement of these securities.
The President of the Central African Banking Commission COBAC, also Governor of the Bank of Central African States BEAC, Abbas Mahamat Tolli, wrote to the Minister of Finance of Cameroon, Louis Paul Motaze, on May 4, 2020, to signify his agreement to “the application of a zero weighting on OTAs issued by the State of Cameroon”, “subject, specifies the correspondence of Abbas Mahamat Tolli, of the prior transmission of the special deposit account agreement duly signed by the stakeholders and in accordance with the terms stipulated ”.
This response is a happy follow-up to Cameroon’s request thereon. On April 14, 2020, Cameroon’s Minister of Finance, Louis Paul Motaze, had indeed written to the secretary general of the Central African Banking Commission (Cobac), requesting a 0% weighting of public securities with free subscription.
“I note that the mechanism for securing the reimbursement of Assimilable Treasury Bonds (OTA) issued by the State of Cameroon, as provided for in the form of collateral in the draft convention of the” special deposit account “is in accordance with the regulations in force, in this case, the Cobac regulations (…) relating respectively to the hedging and the risk division ”, the President of COBAC.
Who continues: “Indeed, the draft convention to govern the creation and operation of the system for securing the reimbursement of OTAs provides for the opening of an escrow account in BEAC.
This account is intended to receive the sums which will be used to reimburse the OTAs issued by the State of a global envelope of 220 billion FCFA structured around three maturities of five, three and two years for respective amounts of 100 billion FCFA , 70 billion FCFA and 50 billion FCFA. In addition, the escrow account will be supplied by direct debits from the public treasury account. “
According to Abbas Mahamat Tolli, “the repayment of the installments and the execution of the payments will be carried out independently of the will of the borrowing State, especially since they will be entrusted to the National Director of BEAC. In addition, arrangements have been made for the proper administrative organization of the reimbursement of OTAs, in particular vis-à-vis the central depositary ”. “All of these measures are likely to guarantee a sufficient and available supply in a reasonable time, before each deadline,” the Chairman of the Central African Banking Commission added.
As a reminder, Cameroon has not been able to achieve its objectives of mobilizing funding for these OTAs. The third and last issue of these securities, for example, allowed the public treasury to raise 34 billion CFA francs out of the 46 proposed by the Specialists in the value of the Treasury (SVT) mobilized by the State of Cameroon on this occasion. This performance enabled the country to raise a total of 140 billion CFA francs, out of the 220 billion that the State was looking for. As a result, certain investments that were to be made with these funds risk being postponed.
