Heirs Energies Ltd. has taken home one of project finance’s most coveted prizes for a $750 million debt deal that its backers say rewrites conventional assumptions about what indigenous African energy companies can pull off in international capital markets.
The Lagos-based producer, which operates Oil Mining Lease 17 in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, was named Best Oil & Gas Deal of the Year at the EMEA Finance Project Finance Awards on June 3 in London. The honour went to a dual-tranche senior secured reserve-based lending facility the company closed with the African Export-Import Bank.
Reserve-based lending is a financing structure common among upstream oil producers, where the borrowing capacity is tied directly to the value of proven hydrocarbon reserves. For Heirs Energies, the deal marked a decisive shift away from the acquisition financing it relied on when Chairman Tony Elumelu’s Heirs Holdings first took over OML 17 from Shell in 2021.
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