By Loni Prinsloo, Anthony Osae-Brown and Emele Onu.
Africa’s biggest money manager and Nigerian pension-fund administrators applied for almost $1 billion of shares in Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals FZE, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Public Investment Corp, which oversees almost $220 billion in assets, including pensions for South African state workers, asked for about $500 million of shares in the initial public offering, said the people who asked not to be identified as the information is still private.
Dangote refinery seeks to raise between $1.6 billion and $2.1 billion in the continent’s biggest IPO to date.
Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, could consider selling down some of his own stake in his Lagos refinery to meet the request in a secondary sale, said the people.
Nigerian pension administrators operating in the nation’s Contributory Pension Scheme system — which has about 11 million members spread across 20 funds — have applied for about $400 million to $500 million of shares in the continent’s top oil refinery, part of which was covered by an earlier private placement, said the people, declining to identify the funds.
Dangote didn’t respond to a request for comment. The PIC declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Pension Fund Operators Association of Nigeria, the umbrella body for the retirement-fund industry, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The IPO values the processing complex at about $50 billion, with the company receiving close to 4 million unique subscription applications.
The Nigerian billionaire might not have met his target of 10 million retail investors, but the unique applications he received compare with 5.1 million individual subscribers to Saudi Aramco’s record-breaking 2019 IPO.
It also dwarfs the roughly 840 000 investors who applied for shares in the landmark 2008 sale of stock in Kenyan wireless carrier Safaricom Plc, previously one of Africa’s broadest transactions.
Dangote launched the IPO on September 14, offering 4.1 billion shares at 525 naira each.
The refinery attracted about 5.85 trillion naira ($4.3 billion) of applications for shares, Bloomberg reported earlier this week.
The money raised will go toward funding a plan to double the processing capacity of the complex — one of Africa’s most strategic industrial assets — to 1.4 million barrels a day.
Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to sign off on Dangote’s allotment of the shares on November 17.
Trading will start 15 business days after that, according to the prospectus, which will likely be on December 8, though the company is targeting the start of trade by the end of this month, subject to approvals.
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