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A company partly owned by a former Mozambican Minister of Agriculture, Tomas Mandlate, is among those involved in an attempt to export illegally huge amounts of timber from the northern port of Nacala, according to a report in Friday’s issue of the independent weekly “Savana”.
A team from the National Environmental Quality Control Agency (AQUA), a unit in the Ministry of Land, Environment and Rural Development, led by its national director, Olivia Amosse, swooped last Saturday, to abort attempts to export 1,020 containers of logs to China.
390 of these containers were found on the premises of the Nacala Special Export Terminal (TEEN). This is a private company in which Mandlate is both a shareholder and chairperson of the Board of Directors.
When confronted by the AQUA inspectors, the managing director of TEEN, Luisa Humbane denied that her company had any involvement in the trafficking of timber, alleging that the terminal is not responsible for inspecting the material stored there.
Clearly AQUA disagreed, since it fined TEEN 15 million meticais (about 207,000 US dollars).
The other containers were on the premises of three Chinese companies, YZOU, Zeng Long and Yang Shu, which were fined respectively 27 million, 3.4 million and 5.6 million meticias (the size of the fines reflecting the different numbers of containers).
The timber was apparently logged, transported, stored, and packed in containers ready for export without the local inspectors (from the police, the tax authority and the Environment Ministry) noticing what was going on. Had it not been for the intervention of Amosse and her AQUA team, 33,000 cubic metres of logs would have been illegally exported to China.
Interviewed by “Savana”, Amosse said the situation she found in Nacala was “very strange”, and showed “we are facing organized crime”.
The containers held logs from a variety of hardwoods of high commercial value. Amosse said the timber business involves large sums of money and is highly profitable. The temptations are “enormous”, she added.
She thought it inconceivable that, where three separate bodies are supposed to be checking timber, nobody noticed that such a large amount was about to be smuggled out of the country. Timber is bulky, she pointed out, and so it makes no sense that large amounts could be logged, transported and packaged without raising the alarm.
AQUA’s figures indicate that, if the smugglers had been successful, the state would have been swindled out of 60 million meticais of revenue. But “Savana”’ s own sources in the timber industry think this is a serious underestimate: they calculate that the total value lost to state in licences and export taxes would have been almost 168 million meticais.
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