Screen
Deals keep arriving. Nothing tells you which ones are real.
African minerals, energy, and infrastructure opportunities reach you through
sponsors, brokers, and people you know. The documents look complete. Your existing
advisers do not cover the jurisdictions, the counterparties, or the ground under
the asset. MOTIF 54 reads what arrives, every month, before it costs you a
partner’s attention.
What the screening covers
Three questions, asked of every deal.
A deal fails for one of three reasons: the asset is not what it is presented to be,
no capital can hold the risk on the terms offered, or nobody with authority is
positioned to say yes. Each deal is read against all three.
What is actually true about the asset
- Ownership and control
- Rights and regulatory standing
- Operating readiness
- Infrastructure dependencies
- Technical evidence
- What is asserted rather than shown
What capital can support it, and on what terms
- Existing capital structure
- Debt appetite
- Equity requirements
- Investor mandates
- Financing constraints
- Bankability and ownership implications
Who decides, and what they must believe
- The counterparty and their backers
- Decision architecture
- The evidence bar
- Objections and internal incentives
- Gating questions
- Conditions for commitment
The retainer
What arrives each month.
Screened deal flow
What reached us in your sectors, filtered against your mandate, each with a
written read: what the asset is, what is verified, what is only asserted, and
what we would establish next.
A maintained decline record
Every deal that does not pass stays on file with the reason recorded. The record
accumulates, and it is what makes a pattern visible across a year rather than a
single quarter.
Access for live questions
When something arrives outside the cycle, or a counterparty needs reading before
a call, the line is open. You are not waiting for the next report.
Evidence
The decline pile.
The most useful thing a screening retainer produces is not the deal that passes. It
is the written reason a deal that looked fundable did not survive contact with the
facts.
Anonymised, with the sponsor and the jurisdiction removed. The reasoning is the
point.
Minerals
Project Ferrous
A producing copper-cobalt asset, pre-revenue by choice, with an ore stockpile
awaiting an independent sampling result and five capital threads running at once:
senior debt, a carbon SAFE, an acquisition, a green bond, an exploration vehicle.
The constraint was not capital scarcity. It was sequencing — five raises
competing for the same trust before the one number that would de-risk all of them
existed. The independently verified stockpile assay became the gate the other
threads wait behind.
Minerals
Project Ironstone
A copper-gold project whose title chain and royalty contract read clean until they
were tested line by line.
Formal defect memos returned material defects in both instruments — the kind
that surface mid-raise, in front of the counterparty, when nobody has tested them
first. Delivered to the sponsor before the process opened.
Energy
Project Meridian
An upstream gas developer’s teaser overstated ownership and left the roles in
the raise ambiguous.
An adversarial pass against the claim architecture returned an eleven-defect memo.
The collateral was rebuilt: ownership language corrected, arranging language and
third-party contact details stripped, and the thesis narrowed to what survives
scrutiny.