The Franklin and Finexem firms, which are negotiating to be Mauritania's advisers, could be among the first to rush into the boulevard opened up to investment banks and consultants by the G20. In October, the organization conditioned the extension of its moratorium on sovereign debt to the obligation, for the beneficiary countries, to preserve equity between creditors.

Mauritania is about to sign with the French law firm Franklin and the British consulting firm Finexem to support the country in the implementation of the G20 moratorium on sovereign debt. Since the extension of this moratorium, put in place in April and extended in October, the beneficiaries have the obligation to simultaneously request a suspension from all their creditors, in order to preserve fairness and prevent private creditors from bear the cost of sovereign debt restructuring.

It was through the networks of former economy minister and Franklin partner Michel Sapin that the firm was able to sign with Nouakchott. Very attached to Mauritania, which he discovered in 1997, during a trip with Jacques Chirac, Michel Sapin has been going there very regularly since (Africa Intelligence, 04/15/15). The former minister of François Hollande was in the Mauritanian capital in mid-December to finalize the final details of this future contract with Andrew Roche, one of the two partners of Finexem, and Stéphan Alamowitch, partner of Franklin and head of the banking department. - finance of the office.

Mauritania's creditors are 60% Gulf development banks, especially Kuwaiti and Saudi, and 20% Asian import-export banks, notably the China Exim Bank (Africa Intelligence, 09/10/19) . The country saw its request to benefit from the G20 moratorium from the spring of 2020 accepted by the Paris Club in June.

Still many countries to conquer

To date, a handful of the 32 African countries that benefit from the moratorium are accompanied by advisers to implement it. This is the case of Angola, which has mandated the firm Lion's Head Global Partners (Africa Intelligence, 29/10/20), of the DRC, which relies on Baker McKenzie, the American law firm by the former director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Christine Lagarde, of Zambia, who appointed Lazard, and of Senegal, which relies both on Global Sovereign Advisory, founded in 2018 by Anne-Laure Kiechel, as well as on Rothschild. The Parnassus cabinet of former IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has multiplied the offers of support to African presidencies and finance ministries but has not, to date, signed any mandate.