Anxious to show that the era of preferential loans to the regime's barons is over, the Angolan administration has drawn up a flattering assessment of the Recredit experiment. A success in trompe l'oeil for the bank which concentrates the loans not repaid to the PBOC: its balance sheet is largely fed by the State itself, and not by the bad payers.

Clearing Recredit's debts was one of the IMF's conditions for further disbursement, and the institution seems to have been filled: on September 16, it approved a $1 billion line of credit for Angola. In its activity report published two weeks earlier, Igape, the holding company that manages Angola's state-owned enterprises, rejoiced in unison: it identified its bad bank Recredit as the first of the "companies that have contributed positively" to its balance sheet. This accounted for 46% of the operating results of public structures - the ranking did not, however, include the two largest of them, the oil company Sonangol and the airline TAAG, which were also in poor financial health.

A surprising success for Recredit, because the bank is struggling to fulfill its initial mission: to recover bad loans granted during the Dos Santos era by the public bank Banco de Poupança e Crédito (BPC). Its debtors have remained mostly anonymous but are often linked to personalities in power (Africa Intelligence of 08/05/2020).

However, these luxury bad payers remain very reluctant to repay their debts. In its latest annual report, Recredit announces that two-thirds of them have acknowledged their loan. It remains for them to repay their claim and for the remaining third party to acknowledge it.

Recredit's gross operating profit, estimated at 183 billion kwanzas ($292 million), is actually mainly driven by two sources: Kz 30 billion ($47 million) in state payments, in the form of treasury bills, and Kz 154 billion ($245 million) in "foreign exchange activities". The bonds paid to Recredit, issued in dollars, have precisely increased in value in kwanzas, due to the depreciation of the latter.