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Monday, November 07, 2016

Projects In Cuba Face Uphill Struggle For Funding

Projects In Cuba Face Uphill Struggle For Funding

No matter how sound their business plans are, European investors in
Cuba, competing for a $500 million Havana airport project and more than
$1 billion worth of renewable-energy projects, are facing an uphill
struggle to obtain funding. That's due to a toxic mix of European banks'
fear of U.S. sanctions and Cuba's rock-bottom debt rating, which makes
any borrowing costly and complicated — if not outright impossible.

Although the French government apparently played a key role in getting
Cuban authorities to sit down with construction giant Bouygues and
Aéroports de Paris to talk about managing and expanding Havana's José
Martí International Airport, as well as building a cargo airport west of
Havana, a successful outcome for the French consortium is far from
guaranteed, a close observer says.

"It's based on a simple letter of intent," a European diplomat who
closely follows the project said about the airport talks. "The
negotiation is still open to competitors, and the proposals have not
been completed."

The biggest obstacle is funding — specifically, French banks' reluctance
to get involved, according to several observers who declined to go on
the record.

"The consortium is still searching for financing, and the project is far
from being tied up, because practically all French banks are declaring
their fear of Uncle Sam's big stick," the diplomat told Cuba Standard.
He added that French banks are going "even beyond the letter of OFAC
regulations", referring to the U.S. agency in charge of enforcing
financial sanctions.

According to observers, the consortium could use a combination of a
debt-to-projects conversion fund the French and Cuban governments are
about to set up, and fresh mid-term credit by France's export guaranty
agency or long-term loans from French development agency AFD. But the
availability of French government-backed funds for the project
apparently makes no difference for the commercial banks.

Cuba, the outcast

Fear of Uncle Sam's big stick aside, commercial banks also have a long
history of treating Cuba as an outcast. Cuba has been serving sovereign
debt religiously for the past eight years, recently settled with
governments that hold defaulted Cuban debt dating back as far as the
1980s, and Moody's earlier this year replaced the 'stable' with a
'positive outlook' for its Caa2 junk rating of Cuban debt. The country,
which has been excluded from any international finance institutions, is
also making steps towards engaging with multilateral lenders such as
CAF-Development Bank of Latin America. But bankers — not surprisingly —
want to be on the safe side and take a wait-and-see attitude, continuing
— at worst — to charge Cuban borrowers whopping interest rates for any
loan longer than one year, or trying to get a hold of revenue streams
originating outside of Cuba as guarantee for any loans at best.

Renewable-energy projects in Cuba, even though they may be 100% owned by
foreign investors, are not likely to obtain any loans from commercial
banks, predicts a European businessman familiar with banks and the
island, because the only revenue stream these investors have at their
hands is from the Cuban state utility.

"That's the reality we're still dealing with in Cuba," the businessman
told Cuba Standard. "That is, unless someone at the top makes the
strategic decision to take a risk and lend with a long-term
perspective," he said about banks.

Burned banks

If a €32 billion (revenues) multinational corporation such as Bouygues
Bâtiment is having a hard time putting together project finance in Cuba,
the challenge is daunting for small, entrepreneurial companies. In the
case of a $165 million biomass power project in Villa Clara province,
Scottish entrepreneur Andrew Macdonald was forced to take an unusual
route to obtain funding — he had to go all the way to Shanghai, and give
up control of his startup company, Havana Energy.

"Renewable energy and biomass is very much in demand in Europe,"
Macdonald said during a recent conference in Havana about investors'
interest. "The returns and potential revenue are fine. The stumbling
block is the threat of North American fines."

Even though the Obama administration recently amended U.S. sanctions
regulations, allowing U.S. financial institutions to clear "u-turn"
dollar transactions involving Cuban entities and third-country banks,
most European financial institutions won't touch Cuba, according to many
sources. Particularly British, French, Swiss and German banks are
abstaining from doing any business — no matter whether in US dollars,
euros, Swiss francs, or British pounds.

"If you go to any High Street in the UK and ask a UK bank to transfer
£10 to Cuba, they tell you they can't do it," Macdonald said.

European banks' abstention is corroborated by Cuban government sources.
Cuba's most recent annual report about the impact of U.S. sanctions,
which was released in September, indicates that at least two British
banks, as a general policy, refuse any transactions involving Cuba. The
report also says that three Italian banks refused to serve an Italian
importer of Cuban products; and that two Spanish banks rejected Cuban
diplomats and a Spanish company doing business in Cuba as clients.

An old story

The fear of British, French and German banks has its roots in a story
that began in the middle of the past century. After World War II, the
United States opened a "eurodollar" mechanism under the Marshall Plan to
rebuild Europe, leading to wide use of dollars among West European banks
in business with third countries, and the development of a separate,
less regulated market for the deposit of those funds. But after the Cold
War ended, the United States tightened controls and told European banks
they now had to route any dollar transfers through U.S. financial
institutions.

"The European banks interpreted that as just a technical measure,
without realizing that the Americans expected Europeans using U.S.
dollars to respect U.S. laws, including their embargos," a European
businessman told Cuba Standard. "That's why BNP Paribas hid their
transactions — naively because they didn't understand the degree of
surveillance new technologies allowed, and naively because they were not
aware of the Americans' propensity to impose their law on the whole
world," he added, referring to the French bank that settled multiple
U.S. investigations in 2014 by paying a jaw-dropping fine of $8.9 billion.

The bank's alleged violations included $1.74 billion of dollar
transactions involving Cuba from 2004 to 2010. As part of the
settlement, BNP Paribas agreed to stop doing business with Cuba
altogether, no matter in what currency.

BNP Paribas was just the most spectacular in a half-dozen enforcement
actions against European banks spanning the Obama administration (see
graphic on page 2), including after President Barack Obama's Dec. 17,
2014 normalization announcement. As recently as October 2015 — amid the
ongoing U.S.-Cuba normalization process — U.S. federal and state
agencies fined France's Crédit Agricole SA and its investment bank
subsidiary CACIB $787 million, in part over Cuba-related dollar
transactions. That was preceded in March 2015 by a $710 million
settlement with Germany's Commerzbank; early this year, Commerzbank
"communicated to Cuban banks it would cease its operations in the coming
months, as a result of the fine imposed by the United States," the Cuban
government said in its annual report about U.S. sanctions.

What's prompting banks to stay away

If close observers are correct, it is mostly legal insecurity over
dollar-transaction skeletons in the banks' closet that continue to
prompt European financial institutions to abstain from Cuba.

"Since the banks understood that the 'big ears' have copied it all,
they've been asking themselves what the U.S. could accuse them of,
should they be investigated," the European diplomat said. "Almost all of
them know they've made a lot of dollar operations five to 10 years ago.
But none of them knows to differentiate those that would fail, and those
that would be passable under U.S. sanctions if tested, because the
records have been filed without having been analyzed from this angle.
The fear of an undetermined sanction is even more effective than that of
a precise sanction. All banks — or almost all of them — prefer to
abstain even from euro transfers to Cuba, Sudan or Iran, or accepting
euro funds from those countries, in order to avoid being visible, to
stay out of sight."

"That's not courageous, but who said that the banking profession
requires courage?", he added.

Seeking 'highest-level declarations'

Cuban officials warmly welcomed Washington's "u-turn" amendment in March
— while pointing out continued enforcement against foreign banks and
suggesting that more needs to be done.

At a press conference in Havana in March, Foreign Minister Bruno
Rodríguez emphasized the importance of the dollar-depenalization
measure, but said that for foreign banks to feel legally and politically
safe enough to engage with Cuba, OFAC will have to issue "numerous legal
clarifications."

"Without doubt, it concerns a significative aspect of the blockade," he
said about the u-turn amendment. "However, for this measure to be
viable, there will have to be political declarations at the highest
level of the U.S. government."

"The banks will have to understand whether this measure, in effect,
means that in the near future the financial persecution against Cuba
ceases. The intimidating effects accumulated during decades will have to
be reverted, particularly in the recent period during which sanctions
were applied against international banks — in other words, foreign banks
from third countries — for more than $14 billion just for relating in a
totally legitimate way with Cuba."

When asked in the recent past by Cuba Standard, U.S. sanctions officials
declined to say whether they stopped Cuba-related enforcement against
third-country banks, but hinted that all recent enforcement actions
against foreign banks are about transactions that date back to before
normalization.

Meanwhile, Obama administration and Cuban officials have held two joint
workshops for finance executives this summer — one in Havana and one in
New York — offering clarifications of what is and what isn't possible
under new U.S. regulations.

"We've issued frequently asked questions and talked at a number of
banking workshops, and talked about all the availability and all the
great many authorizations we've introduced, so that Cuban financial
institutions can engage and can offload any surplus of dollars they may
have accumulated through different trade," a senior Obama administration
official said in a conference call with reporters in October.

However, all of the clarifications have been aimed at the concerns of
Cuban and U.S. banks, according to participants in the workshops, not
third-country banks.

What's more, increasing the insecurity, a new president will be in the
White House in January, and his or her day-to-day practice in regards to
enforcing U.S. sanctions with third-country banks is yet to be known.

Obama issued a new presidential policy directive (see page 14) that lays
out a more cooperative approach for national security policy towards
Cuba. But it could be rescinded very quickly by his successor, Cuban
officials have pointed out.

Handing control to Chinese partners

In the meantime, most European banks refuse to touch Cuba, and Andrew
Macdonald — even though his company features a former UK energy minister
as chairman of the board — saw himself forced to seek funding in a
country that is less vulnerable to U.S. enforcement actions.

In May, five years after founding Havana Energy Ltd. and three years
after forming the BioPower joint venture with Zerus S.A., a subsidiary
of state sugar holding Azcuba, the Scottish entrepreneur announced he
obtained funding and an Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC)
agreement in China. The deal with Shanghai Electric Co. Ltd. allows the
joint venture to go ahead with construction of a $165 million biomass
power plant connected to the Ciro Redondo sugarmill in Central Cuba. The
main financing contracts have been signed with Shanghai Electric, and
the process is about to be wrapped up.

"We are in the final stage of finalizing guarantees, and the Banco
Nacional de Cuba is about to implement them," Zerus President Francisco
Llaó Martínez said in September.

Macdonald refused to reveal any details about the arrangement with his
Chinese partners, citing fears about the U.S. "financial blockade". He
later confirmed to Cuba Standard he sold a majority stake in his company
to Chinese partners.

Macdonald said that the Ciro Redondo project is only the first of five
similar power plants offered by Cuba to BioPower S.A. In total, the
joint venture hopes to build a capacity of 310 mw, at an estimated cost
of $825 million.

The design of the power plant at Ciro Redondo will be "quickly"
replicated in plants 2,3,4 and 5, Macdonald said. Asked whether Havana
Energy will have the capacity to secure enough funding for the
additional power projects, he said it does.

"In the absence of banks, there is an opportunity for frontier
investors," said the European businessman familiar with banking in Cuba,
asked about the Shanghai Electric deal. "No doubt."

Spanish, Canadian banks to the rescue?

Short of seeking investors such as Shanghai Electric, or "burned"
European banks returning to doing business in Cuba, there may still be
an alternative within reach.

Several foreign banking sources in Cuba suggest that Spanish and
Canadian banks might be in a position to fill some of the gaps left by
their French, British and German competitors. Spain's Bankia, Banco
Sabadell, Santander and BBVA enjoy a more robust presence in Cuba,
because they have not been exposed to the eurodollar system, and because
they have long been doing considerable business throughout Latin
America. Thanks to that, they have been more aware of the limits imposed
by the hegemonic power to the North, these sources say.

Similarly, National Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Canada, and Scotiabank
could start with a relatively clean slate vis-a-vis U.S. sanctions
enforcers.

"Spanish and Canadian banks have behaved more like Latin banks," the
European businessman said. "They have learned how to deal with the
hegemonic power. They have always been very aware to not cross that fine
line with U.S. authorities."

In addition, banks from non-traditional countries, such as National Bank
of Qatar — the Persian Gulf region's largest lender — Panama's
Multibank, and another Latin American bank are in the process of opening
representative offices in Cuba.

Source: Projects In Cuba Face Uphill Struggle For Funding -
https://fronteranews.com/news/latam/projects-cuba-face-uphill-struggle-funding/

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