Kenyan brewer EABL says medium-term bond oversubscribed

NAIROBI, March 29 (Reuters) - Kenya's East African Breweries (EABL) got a 141 percent subscription rate for its five-year corporate bond, the company said on Wednesday.

The company, which is controlled by Britain's Diageo (Euronext: DGE.NX - news) , said investors offered 8.45 billion shillings ($82 million), well above the 6 billion shillings it sought.

"These funds will be used to restructure our balance sheet which entails the repayment of short term loans, replacing them with the medium term debt," Gyorgy Geiszl, the group's chief financial officer, told Reuters.

The bond is the second tranche of an issue that was first offered to the market in 2015.

Geiszl said the restructuring of the balance sheet would also help the group comply with the market regulator's current asset ratio rules. The bond has a fixed annual rate of 14.17 percent, well above the current rate on the Kenyan 364-day Treasury bill of 10.914 percent.

Geiszl said there were no immediate plans to raise more debt, but the firm would review the situation if the need arose.

"We see numerous growth opportunities in the countries that we operate in. If any of those materializes beyond our business-as-usual level of investment, we will reach out to the markets for funding," he said.

EABL also operates in neighbouring Uganda and Tanzania.

($1 = 103.0000 Kenyan shillings) (Reporting by Duncan Miriri; Editing by Mark Potter)