30 December 2008
Maputo — The Mozambican authorities have aborted an apparently illicit attempt to export 93 containers of logs from the northern port of Pemba, reports Tuesday's issue of the Maputo daily "Noticias".
The containers were already on board a ship, which was about to sale for Asia, when the Cabo Delgado Provincial Forestry and Wild Life Services cancelled the export licence granted to the timber company Pacifico Internacional, owner of 18 of the containers.
According to the director of the Forestry Services, Castro Rassul, his institution took this decision because it discovered that the 255 cubic metres of the precision hardwood jambirre that was the cargo had not been processed.
The Mozambican government has banned the export of logs. Jambirre and other hardwoods may only be exported after processing. Pacifico Internacional had told Rassul's department that the wood was in the form of sawn planks.
But it turned out that the only work the company had done on the logs was to saw them down the middle. They still counted as logs and were certainly not planks. Rassul said that the customs service was informed of this irregularity - yet customs officials mysteriously allowed this illicit cargo to be loaded onto the ship.
In addition to canceling the licence, the wood has been confiscated, and is now state property, to be disposed of by the authorities in the way they deem most appropriate. An official in the forestry services suspected of conniving with the illegal export has been suspended.
Pacifico Internacional decided it was not going down alone, and denounced a second company, Mofid, which had 75 containers on board the same ship, the "Pacific Diamond". It accused Mofid of breaking exactly the same forestry regulations.
So the Forestry and Wild Life Services ordered that all the Mofid containers be unloaded too. The result was that the "Pacific Diamond" left Pemba without any cargo at all - the port authorities needed the space at the quay for another vessel that was waiting in the bay.
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