Narrative
Full Description
Project narrative
In October 2018, a syndicate of 27 banks — including the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) — entered into a $650 million USD syndicated Multicurrency Revolving Credit Facility (RCF) agreement with ECOM Agroindustrial Corp. Limited (EACL) — a Pully, Switzerland-based privately-held global commodity trading and processing company specializing in coffee, cotton, and cocoa — for refinancing purposes. This RCF was divided into two tranches: a $216.7 million USD tranche with a maturity period of three years with a one-year extension option and a $433.3 million USD tranche with a maturity period of one year, but with three one-year extension options. This was a social impact RCF, containing incentives (discounts on the interest rate) based on the borrower's performance against its social impact objectives, with any discount received distributed by the borrower into the ECOM Foundation that supports projects in origin-producing communities and ECOM’s Sustainable Management Services division that provides agronomy services and technical assistance to farmers and communities. The proceeds were used by the borrower to refinance a $650 million USD RCF signed in October 2016 and then extended in 2017. In addition to ABC, the following lenders contributed to the loan syndicate: ABN AMRO Bank N.V., BNP Paribas (Suisse) S.A., Commerzbank AG, HSBC Bank, ING Group N.V., Natixis, Coöperatieve Rabobank U.A., Raiffeisen Bank International AG, Zürcher Kantonalbank (ZKB), Banco do Brasil S.A., Deutsche Bank, KFW IPEX-Bank GmbH, UBS AG, UniCredit S.p.A., the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd. (BTMU), Crédit Agricole (Suisse) S.A. (CAS), DZ Bank AG, Garanti Bank, KBC Bank N.V., Nedbank, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, Limited (OCBC Bank), Société Générale S.A. (SocGen), Wells Fargo Bank N.A., Banque Cantonale de Genève (BCGE), and Banque Internationale de Commerce - BRED (Suisse) S.A. (BIC-BRED). ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas (Suisse), and Commerzbank were the original mandated lead arrangers and bookrunners. HSBC, ING, Natixis, Rabobank, Raiffeisen Bank International, and ZKB served as mandated lead arrangers and bookrunners. Banco do Brasil, Deutsche Bank, KFW IPEX-Bank, UBS, and UniCredit served as lead arrangers. ABC, BTMU, Crédit Agricole (Suisse), DZ Bank, Garanti Bank, KBC Bank, Ned Bank, OCBC Bank, SocGen, and Wells Fargo served as arrangers. BCGE and BIC-BRED served as participants. The loan was closed oversubscribed before contributions were scaled back for all lenders.
Staff comments
1. The individual contributions of the 27 lenders to this $650 million USD syndicated RCF are unknown. For the time being, AidData has assumed that each lender contributed equally to each of the two tranches. Therefore, AidData has coded ABC's contribution by assuming that each lender contributed equally ($24,074,074.0741 USD) to the entire loan. 2. As it is unclear whether ABC contributed to each tranche, for the time being AidData has taken the average maturity period of the tranches {[(3 + 1) / 2] = 2} and coded it as the maturity period of this record.