Mozambique: Filipo affected more than 28,000 in capital city
The trial began in Maputo on Thursday of the former general director of the Mozambican Export Promotion Institute (IPEX), Cecilia Candrinho, charged with abusing her office by awarding the organisation of the Maputo International Trade Fair (FACIM) to a private company without any public tender.
The private company is Santos & Rey – Estruturas e Eventos (SR). It ran FACIM between 2012 and 2015, and for its work over this period it received 127 million meticais (about 3.2 million US dollars, at the exchange rate of the time).
The matter came to the notice of the Administrative Tribunal, the body that inspects the legality of public expenditure. In its opinion on the General State Account for 2014, the Tribunal said “there was no explanation of the criteria adopted to select the company Santos & Rey”. Payment was made to the company, the Tribunal noted, without a contract and simply under a memorandum of understanding.
The excuse for this procedure, the Tribunal said, was that otherwise it would have been impossible to hold FACIM. But the Tribunal found IPEX was unable to indicate “how this company was selected, and reports on the activities it undertook were not presented”.
Candrinho signed the memorandum of understanding with SR in 2012, with a period of validity of five years. But the memorandum was not shown to the Administrative Tribunal for its approval, which in itself is a violation of the country’s financial legislation.
At her trial before the Maputo City Court, Candrinho used exactly the same defence. She said she had used the services of SR to safeguard the interests of the state, since otherwise IPEX would have found it impossible to hold FACIM.
Cited in Friday’s issue of the Maputo daily “Noticias”, Candrinho’s lawyer, Alexandre Chivale, said that at the time IPEX had no budget for organising FACIM, and so went looking for a partner. It found SR, which was only paid for its services after the trade fair.
IPEX was responsible for FACIM, but, as the years passed, the funds made available from the state treasury “were insufficient to organise the Fair”, claimed Chivale.
It was only thanks to the memorandum of understanding with SR that it was possible to hold FACIM between 2012 and 2015, he said. The memorandum was used because a contract between IPEX and SR was refused by the Administrative Tribunal.
Chivale claimed that failure to organise FACIM “would lead to Mozambique being banned from the Union of International Fairs (UFI)”. This would have a harmful effect on investment and hence on taxation.
IPEX is indeed a member of UFI. But there is nothing in the UFI website indicating that is has the power to “ban” countries merely because they fail to hold trade fairs for one or more years.
Chivale claimed that his client had acted within the law and that the charge against her was “shameful”.
Leave a Reply
Be the First to Comment!
You must be logged in to post a comment.
You must be logged in to post a comment.