ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA — The Dangote Petroleum Refinery, the largest single-train refinery on this planet at 650,000 barrels per day, has placed shares before the public. The refinery stands near Lagos, in Nigeria; the restriction stands in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia has read the same prospectus and arrived at a narrower definition of the word "public." Under current rules, residents may join the offer only as qualified investors, capped at one hundred persons, unless the capital markets regulator approves more. The regulator is also the office that wrote the cap.
This desk measures the distance between what is declared and what is printed. Declared: a public offer, open to a nation of roughly 126 million. Printed, several pages later, on the eligibility schedule: one hundred qualified investors. Measured distance between the two statements: 125,999,900 residents, plus any the regulator may later admit. In the schedule's units, the nation rounds down to one hundred. Local financial pages have printed both figures in the same articles; this desk has located none in which the figures share a sentence. Count of shared sentences to date: zero.
"The offer has never been closed to the public," said Wondimu Tesfaye, Director of Investor Classification at the capital markets regulator. "The public has been closed to the offer. Those are different doors, and only one of them is ours." Brokers relay the same comfort. "Every Ethiopian may apply," said Selamawit Girma, head of retail subscriptions at a brokerage in the capital. "Approximately one hundred applications will succeed. The others will have participated fully in a process, which is its own form of ownership, and cheaper."
The schedule contains a relief clause: the cap of one hundred may rise, at the discretion of the regulator — the office that set it. Applicant 101 is not refused under this arrangement. Applicant 101 is pending. Applicant 102 is pending. Applicant 125,999,900 is pending with distinction. Locals place such applicants on a waiting list, which they define as the queue of the queue. Funds from the successful hundred will travel through an institution licensed to store numbers; the remaining public will continue storing its own.
No official has called the arrangement exclusive. No document calls it anything but an offer. No coverage appears to have performed the subtraction. The arithmetic files itself as one row: PUBLIC OFFER — ELIGIBLE: 100 — REMAINING PUBLIC: 125,999,900 — CAP RAISES: AT THE DISCRETION OF THE OFFICE THAT COUNTED.
