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Mozambique: Company Part Owned By Guebuza Pays Off Loan
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
17 December 2007
Posted to the web 17 December 2007
Maputo
The fishing company Mavimbi, owned in part by Mozambican President Armando Guebuza, has paid in full its debt to the treasury, reports the latest issue of the Maputo weekly "Savana".
These treasury loans have been highly controversial, because some of them went to companies in which prominent figures from the ruling Frelimo Party held interests. The loans were a means by which foreign aid (mostly from Japan) was channeled to private companies, who were then supposed to repay the treasury in local currency.
This proved a highly inefficient way of assisting the private sector, and no such loans have been granted since 2002.
Every year the Administrative Tribunal, the body that checks the legality of public expenditure, reports on the General State Accounts, and these reports always note the state of repayment of the treasury loans. Since many of the loans were not being repaid this was a propaganda gift for opposition deputies during the annual debates on the General State Accounts in the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic.
The opposition suggested that prominent politicians, including Guebuza, had stolen the money with no intention of repaying it..
Mavimbi was granted a loan of 2.5 million US dollars in 2001, which was used to buy a fishing boat. By the end of 2006 very little of this had been paid.
But in 2006, Mavimbi was making a healthy profit, and this enabled the company to pay off its debt entirely in early 2007. Mavimbi director Moises Massinga told "Savana" that the debt was paid in January. He could prove it with a note dated 13 February, from the National Treasury Directorate, acknowledging fall payment of the debt.
"Savana" claims that the payment is late, and was only made because of pressure from civil society and donors, but a far more likely explanation is that Mavimbi was running at a loss until 2006.
The latest edition of "The 100 Top companies" in Mozambique, published by the consultancy company KPMG, ranks Mavimbi as number 95, with net profit in 2006 of 3.5 million meticais (about 146,000 dollars), compared with a slight loss (304,000 meticais) in 2005.
While 3.5 million meticais is not enough to pay off the loan, Mavimbi may have been able to dip into its assets (valued at 152 million meticais), or use the apparently healthy state of the company to arrange other forms of financing, and free itself from the embarrassment of a company part-owned by the President owing money to the treasury.
The opposition has also made a great deal of noise about a loan to Inagrico, a company in which lawyer Albano Silva, the husband of Prime Minister Luisa Diogo, owns a 25 per cent stake. But in fact regular payments have been made, but in late 2006 the debt still stood at 6.9 million meticais.
However, Silva told AIM that this year payments have been stepped up from 7,000 to 10,000 dollars a month, and the company had every intention of clearing the debt by 2008.
"Savana" claims, wrongly, that there were three separate loans to Inagrico, in 2000, 2001 and 2002. In fact, these are all parts of one and the same loan: the money appears spread over three years, because it was not paid into any Inagrico bank account but used by the donor to buy, via international tenders, goods on a list provided by the company (which specialises in supplying pumping equipment to filling stations).
A further company that obtained a treasury loan was the transport company Mecula, one of whose owners is former defence minister Alberto Chipande. After making some payments earlier in the decade, Mecula repaid none of its loan in 2006. By the end of the year the amount owed stood at 44.8 million meticais.
Questioned by Savana, Chipande pointed out that at least Mecula is still functioning, offering passenger services in the north of the country. "Where are Virginia, TSL, Bengala ?", he asked, referring to other bus companies that have gone bankrupt. (One of those companies, TSL, took a treasury loan of 68.2 million dollars and has repaid almost none of it. Some TSL buses were auctioned off to pay other creditors, but "Savana" claims that others are still on the road in Inhambane province).
The frequent claim that all the loans went to senior Frelimo figures is inaccurate. The largest single loan was for slightly more than 80 million meticais, and did not go to a private company at all, but to the publicly owned Maputo bus company, TPM, which by 2006 had not repaid anything at all.
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There is little the treasury can do to force TPM to pay up. Almost the only assets TPM has are its buses, and seizing them would simply deprive the Maputo public of transport.
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| Copyright © 2007 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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