by Noele Illien and Kirstin Ridley
ZURICH (Reuters) – Credit Suisse has reached a last-minute out-of-court settlement with Mozambique over the more than decade-old tuna bonds affair involving loans worth more than 1 .5 billion dollars, declared Sunday UBS which had inherited the scandal with the takeover of the bank.
“The parties have mutually released each other from any liability and claims relating to the transactions,” UBS said in a statement. “The parties are pleased to have resolved this long-standing dispute,” the bank added, without providing further details.
Under the deal, reached a day before the start of a three-month civil trial in London, UBS will forgive part of a loan that Credit Suisse made to Mozambique in 2013, amounting to less than 100 million dollars, said a source familiar with the matter who requested anonymity.
The deal also includes most of the creditors involved in financing a 2013 loan to ProIndicus, a Mozambican state-owned company, UBS said.
Mozambique’s Attorney General’s Office and the Ministry of Economy and Finance announced that they will convene a joint press conference on Monday morning in Maputo.
The “tuna bonds” affair concerns three transactions between Mozambican state-owned companies and the shipbuilder Privinvest, financed in part by loans and bonds from Credit Suisse and supported by guarantees from the Mozambican government, the amount of which was not been disclosed.
UBS, which bought Credit Suisse at the start of the year, has a financial reserve of $10 billion to deal with possible litigation, JPMorgan analysts estimated in a note to their clients on Wednesday.
(With contributions from Oliver Hirt in Zurich and Nqobile Dludla and Manuel Mucari in Maputo; French version Kate Entringer)
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