In the 1st week of COP27, just a couple of days after "Finance Day", one chapter in one country's debt/climate/fossil fuel story concluded. Chad, an oil producing African nation, became the first country to get a debt restructuring under the Common Framework.

The deal was criticised by World Bank president David Malpass because it didn't actually reduce the NPV (roughly, the total amount that creditors would receive). marketscreener.com/quote/stock/GL…

However it was good enough for the IMF, with MD Kristalina Georgeiva pointing out that it protected the country from further oil price falls. It's expected the restructuring will allow mean Chad receives $145m under its IMF programme in the next few weeks. reuters.com/world/africa/i…

The oil price matters more to Chad than most oil exporting countries because a large chunk of the country's debt is owed to Glencore, the big commodities trader/diversified miner. Glencore lent to Chad against its future oil revenues in 2013 and 2014.

From this World Bank debt sustainability analysis published in 2019, it looks like by 2017, Glencore was the country's biggest single creditor, owed perhaps 50% of Chad's outstanding debt.

A big component of this latest restructuring seems to be Glencore agreeing to some kind of repayment deferral (mix of principal and/or interest, I don't know) in the event of low oil prices. That made the IMF satisfied enough to extend more finance.

But 2 things stand out (apart from a country having so much debt to a single company). 1/ Glencore had already restructured Chad's debt back in 2018 (in fact that was the 2nd such restructuring) and at the time it was considered to protect the country against lower revenues.