Private Equity Moris Beracha Wuani

By Ledger Insights Yesterday the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) announced that they’ve enabled the secondary trades of the World Bank’s bond-i bond to be recorded on a blockchain. Nine months ago CBA arranged the Blockchain Offered New Debt Instrument (bond-i) issuance of A$110 million (US $76m). It’s part of the World Bank’s annual $50-$60 billion bond issuance. “Enabling secondary trading [to be] recorded on the blockchain is a tremendous step forward towards enabling capital markets to leverage distributed ledger technologies for faster, more efficient, and more secure transactions,” said World Bank VP and Treasurer Jingdong Hua. “It speaks to the innovation and commitment of all our partners, including investors, that we were able to achieve this together.” The bond-i platform is a permissioned network with nodes in Sydney and Washington. It features automated bond auct...

Image of @InfoNebeus By Maria Yavuz Nebeus, the London-based crypto platform, has launched a 1.1 million pound ($1.45 million) crowdfunding campaign as they set out their ambitious goal of bringing financial services to people around the world. According to the World Bank, there are 1.7 billion adults globally who remain unbanked, yet two-thirds of them own a mobile phone that they could use for online banking. The Nebeus’ campaign went live on Sept. 24, 2018 and has already attracted more than 400,000 pounds ($527,490). The goals of the campaign Backed by industry expert Brett King, the Nebeus campaign will last until October 23, 2018. Currently operating in 45 countries, they now plan for expansion across Europe, Asia and South America. The company wants to make banking simple for people and encourages a wider use of cryptocurrency in everyday spending, offering user-friendly Bitcoin wallets and its recently launched Exo card. The new prepaid card allows users to s...

  By Georgeta Gheorghe The strong momentum underway in Central Europe’s private equity markets is set to continue,  the latest Deloitte Central Europe Private Equity Confidence Survey shows. The high level of deal activity in Central Europe’s private equity markets is set to continue, with two-thirds of respondents expecting market activity to remain the same, the highest level in three years. Nearly a third (31 percent) expect activity to increase further from its currently high level, and just 2 percent expect activity to slow down – the lowest level in five years. It then comes as no surprise that two-thirds of respondents (69 percent) expect to focus mostly on deal-doing in the coming months, in line with the survey over the last two years. Expectations will be buoyed by liquid leverage markets, with three quarters of respondents (74 percent) expecting the availability of debt finance to remain the same over coming months. This is up from two thirds (67 percent) in the ...

Once a rising star of the investment world, firm may become one of the industry’s largest-ever failures By Simon Clark  Abraaj Group, the emerging-markets private-equity firm under pressure from creditors and investors, said Thursday its Cayman Islands-based holding company filed for liquidation, in what could be one of the industry’s largest-ever failures,  The Wall Street Journal  reports. Founded in Dubai in 2002 by Pakistani deal maker Arif Naqvi, Abraaj managed nearly $14bn at its peak earlier this year and was a rising star of the Middle East investment world. But the firm came under pressure in recent months as some investors in its funds alleged it misused some of their money and two lenders claimed hundreds of millions of dollars of debt were unpaid. The court-supervised restructuring of Abraaj Holdings in the Cayman Islands “imposes a moratorium on the enforcement of all unsecured claims against the company, allowing t...