Reporting and measuring: resource-backed loans in debt statistics
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One of the reasons for the opacity of resource-backed loans lies in their statistical treatment. A prepayment granted to a national oil company without a state guarantee may escape the public debt statistics even though it commits the country’s production. An advance against deliveries may be booked as a commercial contract. An escrow account abroad may, for its part, divert revenues away from the budget. Since 2018 the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have tightened their requirements: inclusion of state-owned enterprise debt in sustainability analyses, publication of guarantees and security interests, limits on resource-backed borrowing under programmes, and recommendations to public and private lenders on collateralised transactions.1 The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative requires, in its standard, the disclosure of resource-backed loans and prepayments by states and by reporting companies. It cites Chad and the reports of Glencore and Trafigura as examples.2
For the Geneva lender, these requirements have a practical consequence: publication of the terms of its loan, long regarded as contrary to its commercial interests, has become a condition of its borrower’s access to Fund programmes and, through that, of the security of its own claim. A loan that appears in no statistics is a loan that the Fund will discover at the next crisis and whose restructuring it will demand. In the field of resource-backed loans, transparency protects the creditor as much as the debtor.
| Country | Lenders and transactions | Lesson |
|---|---|---|
| Chad | Glencore, 2013–2014; restructurings in 2015, 2018 and 2022 | price sensitivity, transparency through the EITI |
| Republic of the Congo | Glencore, Trafigura; USD 1.7 billion to be restructured | condition of IMF programmes, link with corruption |
| Angola | Chinese state banks; at least USD 23 billion in 2020 | scale of indebtedness, escrow accounts, debt relief |
| South Sudan | international traders, forward sales | financing a state at war, reputational risk |
| Democratic Republic of the Congo | Sicomines, nearly 40% of external debt | infrastructure for minerals |
| Ghana (cocoa) | annual Cocobod syndicated loan since 1992–1993 | transparent model, interrupted in 2024 by the price crisis |
The cases in the table are those the chapter has described. Their amounts refer to the sources cited in the notes.
Notes
- IMF and World Bank, Collateralized Transactions: Key Considerations for Public Lenders and Borrowers, 19 February 2020: collateralised transactions “can be beneficial to a developing country borrower under a range of circumstances” but restrict fiscal room for manoeuvre and raise negative pledge issues; IMF, “Debt Limits Policy” (imf.org/en/topics/sovereign-debt/debt-limits-policy); Mihalyi and Hwang, World Bank, 2022 (2020 IMF–World Bank framework on disclosure of collateralised debt). ↩
- Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, “Prêts adossés à des ressources” [Resource-backed loans], guidance note, eiti.org (accessed September 2026). ↩
For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.