Political risk assessment for a global energy firm transitioning to renewables in Africa

As a result over focus on climate and environmental issues, a global energy and mining firm requested assistance with executing a major investment strategy into renewables across Africa and a number of other continents.

Our consultants were engaged to carry out political risk due diligence on two potential investment targets in North Africa and West Africa, both of which had exposures to local communities and state level political volatility. the team utilised a wide range of sources ranging from databases to satellite imagery to help understand the status of each of the investment targets and their exposure to political risk at the state level and on the ground. We reviewed documentation around the projects themselves, investigated individuals involved in each investment target, assessed each targets policies and procedures to deal with political risk, and analysed open source intelligence and satellite imagery to determine the status of relationships with local communities nearby to the renewables sites.

Once this work was completed, we identified a wide range of political risk scenarios that might affect the client should the transactions go ahead for each scenario we assess the likelihood and impact of the potential risk and developed a four risk reduction plan and road map that the client could present to the board. We also subsequently dealt with a number of queries passed to us from the client senior executives which we are able to respond to extremely quickly as part of our reactive intelligence request process.