As South African businesses suffer the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and national lockdown, small businesses can apply for debt relief from most of the major South African banks and several state programmes.

The Department of Small Business has announced multiple interventions to assist small businesses. In addition to tax subsidies and incentives for compliant

The Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) was introduced with the implementation of Basel III, and is designed to ensure that financial institutions have the necessary assets on hand to ride out short-term liquidity disruptions. Two important elements of the LCR that are especially relevant to South African banks are:

1.   The LCR in South Africa was

When rating agencies downgrade the credit ratings of South Africa’s banks or the country’s sovereign credit rating, whether justifiably or not, it raises interesting questions for the operation of project financing agreements.

Definitions in finance documents designate a class of financial institutions as ‘acceptable banks’. This definition is commonly used in project finance transactions as

The SA Reserve Bank is adopting a wait-and-see approach.

The Volcker Rule came into force in the US in April 2014. The Volcker Rule is a federal regulation under the Dodd-Frank Act that, subject to exceptions, prohibits US commercial banks from engaging in short-term proprietary trading of many financial instruments for their own account. The

The European Union, the USA and Canada have imposed sanctions on a number of Russian and Ukrainian individuals and legal entities. The nature and scope of the sanctions are explained in this briefing.

If a bank has entered into credit risk mitigation arrangements with Russian or Ukrainian counterparties, or relating to Russian or Ukrainian assets,

A court can issue an order placing a company in business rescue if it is shown that the company has reasonable prospects of being restored to a continued solvent existence or of achieving a better return for creditors and shareholders than would result from immediate liquidation. The supreme court of appeal made this finding in