Senegal’s Quickfire Debt Workout Plan Already Faces Speedbumps

Senegal’s year-end target to finalize a deal with the International Monetary Fund and reach a debt-relief agreement with bondholders is already facing delays, according to people familiar with the situation.

The IMF’s executive board would find it hard to approve the financing program before year-end because an international audit on Senegal’s liabilities remains outstanding, said the people who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. That step requires the work of an international auditing firm, they said.

Bondholders, meanwhile, have written to the government warning of “significant delays” to a debt revamp if they’re asked to take losses.

The bondholder group, which includes BlackRock Inc., VR Capital Group and Farallon Capital Management, issued the warning in an Oct. 3 letter to Senegal, parts of which were seen by Bloomberg. Any request for reductions to the principal or for lower average coupons risks prolonging the process, they said.

Senegal is seeking to rapidly rework its debt using an improved version of the Group of 20’s Common Framework, a toolkit designed to help poor nations avoid chaotic defaults and already used to restructure some $45 billion in sovereign debt.

The bondholders noted in their letter that most recent sovereign restructurings, both inside and outside the Common Framework, have encountered delays, “which we think is avoidable here.”

They proposed a “reprofiling” that would extend eurobond maturities beyond the term of a planned IMF program “without nominal principal haircuts or reduction in average coupons.” Such a plan should satisfy the “comparability of treatment” principle, which requires private lenders to provide debt relief similar to what’s granted by government creditors, the letter added.

Alvarez & Marsal, the financial advisor representing the bondholders, declined to comment. Senegal’s finance ministry and government spokespeople didn’t respond to calls, texts and emails seeking comment.

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The bondholders’ letter implies they will push back against any demands for haircuts. However, it will be the IMF’s debt sustainability analysis that ultimately dictates how much debt relief Senegal needs, one of the people said.

Still, a delay would not be surprising, given Senegal aims to finish in weeks a process that took peers such as Zambia and Ghana years. At an Oct. 6 meeting with lenders, the government outlined plans to reach agreements in principle with official creditors and bondholders in December, with implementation in the first quarter of 2027.

Meeting that timetable, however, hinges on official creditors negotiating in parallel with bondholders rather than going first — a change they are likely to resist. That issue emerged as a sticking point during Zambia’s restructuring in 2023, when official creditors rejected a deal bondholders on the grounds that it failed to meet comparability-of-treatment requirements.

Senegal also wants to exclude CFA franc-denominated debt from restructuring, potentially leaving external creditors to shoulder a larger share of losses. Another potential sticking point is the $1.7 billion that Senegal has borrowed from banks via total-return swaps.

As of end-2025, the country had some $48.4 billion of debt, equivalent to 105% of rebased gross domestic product, according to the Oct. 6 government presentation. External debt comprised $32.8 billion, with $9.7 billion owed to commercial creditors and $7.8 billion to bilateral lenders.

Senegal notes maturing in 2033 and 2048 were trading just above 52 cents on the dollar on Tuesday, having ceded some of the gains made immediately after the government’s Oct. 6 presentation.

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