The UK High Court has given Zimbabwe’s Finance Minister and the country’s national oil company until the end of January 2026 to file a defence in a lawsuit brought by Libya’s central bank for more than US$100 million.
The claim was filed in November by the Libyan Foreign Bank (LFB), a unit of the Central Bank of Libya, in the UK High Court’s commercial division. The lawsuit concerns loans made under a 2001 credit facility that Zimbabwe is alleged to have failed to repay.
Justice Richard Jacobs has ordered the Zimbabwean defendants to submit their defence by the end of this month.
Zimbabwe has been largely shut out of international capital markets due to unpaid debts of at least US$21 billion, including arrears owed to the World Bank and other multilateral lenders accumulated over the past 26 years. The country is also in dispute with several private creditors.
According to LFB, Zimbabwe’s state-owned fuel distributor, the National Oil Infrastructure Company of Zimbabwe, entered into a US$90 million credit facility with the Libyan bank in 2001.
Nearly half of that sum was drawn down over the following two years to pay for fuel imports from Oilinvest BV of the Netherlands.
The company has repaid only US$5.5 million in four instalments between 2013 and 2023. Including interest, the outstanding amount now exceeds US$100 million, LFB claims.
Simba Makoni, Zimbabwe’s finance minister at the time the facility was signed, agreed that the ministry would act as guarantor for the debt.
LFB also says that Zimbabwean officials have repeatedly acknowledged the outstanding debt in correspondence since 2005.
Current Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube has accepted that the case can proceed in the UK court, after initially challenging its jurisdiction, according to Justice Jacobs’ order.
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