BEIJING (Reuters) – China will continue cooperating with all sides to advance Zambia’s debt restructuring, a foreign ministry spokesperson said on Tuesday, without saying if it supported a proposed deal the southern African country reached with overseas bondholders.
Zambia and the bondholder group said on Monday that they reached a new agreement to restructure $3 billion of international bonds and that the proposal had been approved by Zambia’s official creditors, of which China is the biggest.
Zambia defaulted more than three years ago and its debt rework process has hit many obstacles, including in November when the official creditors rejected a previous bond deal on the grounds that it did not offer comparable debt relief to theirs.
“China, as co-chair of the Zambian Debt Committee, has made concerted efforts with all parties concerned to promote significant progress in the disposal of Zambia’s debt,” Lin Jian, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a regular press conference.
“China will also continue to coordinate and cooperate with all parties concerned in order to steadily advance the work related to Zambia’s debt disposal,” he said, when asked for China’s response to the latest bondholder deal.
(Reporting by Yew Lun Tian, Additional reporting by Joe Cash, Writing by Rachel Savage in Johannesburg, Editing by Louise Heavens)
