Maputo, Mozambique — Mozambique's largest bank, the BCM, has decided to take debtors to court, in an effort to recover some of the unwise loans which brought it to the verge of bankruptcy.

One of the debtors whose goods are about to be sold at public auction is a trader in the central city of Quelimane, Rachid Tayob - who also happens to be a Member of Parliament elected on the ticket of the Renamo-Electoral Union opposition coalition.

Tayob says that Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama personally expelled him from the party last November. He is reported to have helped finance Renamo's transformation from a military movement to a political party in the early 1990s to the tune of two billion meticais (about 100,000 US dollars).

Dhlakama reportedly never paid back the money advanced by Tayob - which may help explain Tayob's difficulties with the bank.

At the request of the BCM, the Zambezia Provincial Court has ordered the public sale of Tayob's property on 24 May.

The main item in the list of goods published in the media is a building containing a residence, a bakery, a butcher's and a general shop, valued at 450 million meticais.

The price the court is asking for everything put together is 471.1 million meticais (slightly less than 24,000 dollars). The hole in the BCM, caused essentially by bad debts for which no provisions had been made, was the equivalent of 127 million dollars in the 1999 BCM accounts.