Stanchart secures $20m deals — As a result of Atuabo Gas plant
Standard Chartered Bank Ghana Limited (Stanchart) has supported local oil service companies, linked with the Atuabo Gas value chain, with $20 million.
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The facility has enabled the companies to procure logistics and set up gas evacuation and storage facilities as part of the gas processing value chain to get the products to end users.
The Managing Director and Head of Corporate and Institutional Clients at Stanchart, Mr Terjinder Singh, said in an interview in Accra that ,“the gas will have to be commercially processed. There has to be storage facilities to store it and then be distributed into the retail channels. We are, therefore, working with some of the private entrepreneurs who are planning to put up or already have the capacity to establish those facilities to do that even before the project is completed.
"We have already financed two such projects and we are now in the process of looking at a couple of others," Mr Singh, who oversees the bank's corporate and institutional clients operations in the sub-region, told the Daily Graphic.
He spoke on the sidelines of a liquidity management workshop organised by the bank for its clients in Accra on November 18.
The programme, which had the theme: “Looking Beyond 2014: Liquidity Management,” was aimed at sharing the solutions the bank could offer its key customers in their individual liquidity management challenges.
It was attended by clients in Accra with resource persons drawn from the banks wealth of experienced managers and experts from offices in Singapore and the African Regional Office in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The Managing Director, Transaction Banking for West Africa at Standard Chartered Bank, Mr Victor Asante, said the bank had over the years leveraged on its networks and resources to support businesses across the world which had culminated into being adjudged the Best Bank in Trade Finance at the latest Ghana Banking Awards.
Rippling effects of gas project
The Atuabo Gas Plant is a multifaceted project that will evacuate raw gas from the Jubilee Fields in the Western Region into a processing plant at Atuabo, which will then be refined into natural gas for use by electricity generating plants and industry.
The business opportunities that the project offers means that entrepreneurs keen on participating in the process required critical finance and Stanchart said it had positioned itself to deliver that much needed finance.
"Even before gas flows, there needs to be a transport and logistics solution; there needs to be storage solution immediately after processing and then the segregation. But all these will not be done by Ghana Gas; it has to be done by smaller entrepreneurs and that is where our role as a bank to support such investments comes to play," Mr Singh said.