The accession agreement was recently signed by the Minister of Economy and Finance of Guinea-Bissau, João Geraldo Martins.
With this signing, Guinea-Bissau has
become the second Portuguese-speaking member of Afreximbank, after
Angola which joined the bank in January 1994.
The two Congos were the last countries to become members of the Bank, with the Republic of Congo joining on the 31st July 2013 and Democratic Republic of Congo on the 25th April 2014.
The other member states of the Bank
include Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroun, Cape Verde, Cote
d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho
and Liberia.
Mozambique, Togo and South Africa have
shareholding in the Bank but have not completed all the formalities to
become full participating states.
Note that, the Bank has four classes of
shareholders broken into classes A, B, C and D. Class A is made up of
governments, central banks, and regional and sub-regional institutions
from Africa while Class B consists of African commercial banks,
insurance companies, and private and public companies. Class C covers
international and non-African financial institutions, economic
organizations, and public investors, while Class D, created in December
2012, is made up of shares that can be allotted to any investor, African
or non-African.
The Nigerian private sector remains the
largest customer of the bank (40% of the loan portfolio). But
Afreximbank seeks to expand its operations into new countries and raise
money from new types of investors: private equity funds, insurance
companies and sovereign wealth funds.