This book is a guide to project financing, primarily used to fund infrastructure projects. While it focuses on electricity projects, its insights can be applied across various sectors. It employs a P&L statement as a framework for approaching deals, with CFADS at its core. It introduces fundamental building blocks to ensure CFADS remains predictable, mechanisms to safeguard its predictability, warning signals for material deviations, and a system of incentives and penalties to manage potential disruptionsall within the structure of a P&L statement.
In summary, this is a practitioners guide in every sense. It sets minimum advisory standards expected by lenders, defines risk-informed contractual clauses that enable commercially bankable agreements, and provides calculations and assumptions necessary for determining debt sizeirrespective of borrower structure or lending arrangements.
What is project financing? A functional definition, highlighting
project & lender configurations.- Profit and loss statement Essence to
distil CFADS, size debt and equity to fund a project.- Making CFADS (& DS)
predictable focusing on each line item of P&L statement.- How to protect
CFADS (& DS) predictability Focus on each line of P&L statement.- Setting
up alarms and policing Deviation of CFADS and DS and potential causes
thereof.- Setting timings periods starts and ends, business days notices
and days to deliver.- Loan Market Association (LMA) precedent Dont
reinvent the wheel but pick n chose.- Security package In case it all goes
pear shaped.- Ancillary facilities Other often necessary or advisable
finance needs in one package.- CPs Confirming facts before committing to
lend.- Portfolio management Policing compliance with credit/facilities
agreement.- Respect established processes & negotiators limitations No
mandate to re-engineer processes.- Basics of electricity and technologies
therein.- Vertically integrated electricity monopolies One end of
regulatory spectrum.- Liberalised electricity markets The other end of
regulatory spectrum.- Investment support regimes They differ by country and
over time! Know what to lookout for?- Electricity market advisors Price
forecasts and insights beyond price forecasts.- Datacentres Their valuation
reports and resilience thereof as off-takers.- Due diligence: Understanding
its general intricacies.- Legal due diligence The details that matter and
why?- Technical due diligence The details that matter and why?- Insurance
due diligence What details matter and why?- Tax due diligence What to
lookout for and why?- Model audit What a model auditor looks for and
confirms to lenders.- Lender's scepticism and curiosity Closing due
diligence gaps and operational reporting cracks.- Single/multiple project vs
numerous projects Materiality informs DD and mitigation needs.- Online,
realtime and collaborative due diligence Live Diligence experience.- The
project financing process From courting, conception, cradle to grave.-
Typical meetings and calls Timetable and workflow on the March to financial
close.- Leverage finance vs project finance Chalk and Cheese.- Epilogue: The
need for further edition of this book.- My project finance teachers A roll
call.
Yandisa Nongena has two engineering degrees, diploma in investment management, diploma in drafting and interpretation of contracts and MSc in Finance and Finance Law, giving Yandisa Nongena diverse and relevant academic foundation for project finance.
Yandisa Nongena was a project finance banker from 2004 to mid-2023 and on borrower side from mid-2023 to early 2025, putting Yandisa Nongena at the centre of closing all deals Yandisa Nongena worked on. Yandisa Nongena rose from an analyst building financial models through the various levels doing each and every workstream along the way, to leading or co-leading deals.
