Mozambique: Casinos pay four million euros in taxes in nine months
The management of the Mozambican subsidiary of the Nigerian bank UBA (United Bank for Africa) has strongly criticised Rogerio Manuel, the chairperson of the Confederation of Mozambican Business Associations (CTA), for his repeated claims that UBA is on the verge of bankruptcy.
Despite his role at the head of the Mozambican business class, Manuel had no hesitation, at two meetings with the press over the past fortnight, in spreading rumours about the financial health of UBA. Such remarks were extremely damaging, and seemed designed to cause a run on the bank.
Manuel was reacting to the collapse of the tiny retail bank, Nosso Banco (“Our Bank”). The Bank of Mozambique, on 11 November, revoked Nosso Banco’s licence, and ordered its liquidation. Manuel reacted furiously, claiming that the central bank should have rescued Nosso Banco, and forecasting that UBA would be the next bank to fail.
Interviewed in Friday’s issue of the independent weekly “Savana”, the chief executive officer of UBA-Mozambique, Helder Chambisse, expressed his shock at Manuel’s intemperate statements. He pointed out that UBA is a member of the Mozambican Association of Banks, which is in turn a member of the CTA. So, if there was any doubt about UBA’s situation, Manuel could have approached the bank’s management and asked for clarification.
Manuel based his attacks on UBA on data from 2015 – but the key ratio for a bank’s health, the solvency ratio, can undergo rapid changes, which is why the figures are analysed every month by the central bank.
“It is true that, in December 2015, our solvency ratio was around 9.8 per cent”, said Chambisse. “Faced with this scenario the bank took a series of measures to reverse the scenario”. (Even a solvency ratio of 9.8 per cent is not bad – the minimum required by the Bank of Mozambique is eight per cent, and Nosso Banco’s solvency ratio had fallen to below zero).
Among the measures UBA took was recapitalisation. Over the last 18 months, a further 15 million US dollars has been injected into the bank. By this month, UBA’s solvency ratio had risen to 14.64 per cent.
“This is the sort of information that the CTA chairperson may not have had”, said Chambisse. “He needed to approach people who know about these matters to explain them”.
Banking was a matter of trust, stressed Chambisse, and when somebody in such a senior position as Manuel casts doubt on the health of a bank, this could damage trust. Since he is an influential figure, he added, Manuel should have used the appropriate channels to find out the true situation.
UBA exists in 19 countries. In Mozambique, it has three branches, in Maputo and Nampula provinces. It employs 85 people, and has 15,000 clients.
Meanwhile, further details have emerged about the collapse of Nosso Banco. This bank became the last haven for one of Mozambique’s most notorious business figures, Mohamed Bachir Suleman, denounced as a drug baron by the United States government in 2010. The administration of President Barack Obama named him as a “drug kingpin”, and the US Treasury Department issued a statement saying that Bachir “is a large scale narcotics trafficker in Mozambique, and his network contributes to the growing trend of narcotics trafficking and related money laundering in southern Africa”.
Banks who do business with the United States will not accept as clients anyone whom the US government has named as a drug baron. So the major Mozambican banks cut their relations with Bachir and with the companies in his MBS Group. As a result the only two cash machines (ATMs) in the flagship MBS Maputo Shopping Centre were owned by Nosso Banco. Now even they must close down.
The MBS Group had accounts at Nosso Banco and, according to “Savana”, a “significant part” of the MBS financial assets were held there. MBS has no access to these accounts while Nosso Banco is liquidated.
The Deposits Guarantee Fund (FGD), operated by the Bank of Mozambique, ensures that individual Nosso Banco clients will receive up to 20,000 meticais (270 US dollars). But the FGD does not cover corporate clients.
Companies such as MBS, with accounts at Nosso Banco, will have to wait until the liquidation commission has worked out the size of the bankruptcy estate before they know how much, if anything, of their money they will receive back.
A further problem client of Nosso Banco, “Savana” writes, is a businessman named Mamade Rassul, from the northern port of Nacala. In violation of instructions from the central bank, Rassul was granted a loan of 30 million dollars. The guarantee offered for this loan was a building in Nacala valued at 1.14 billion meticais (15.4 million dollars at current exchange rates, but worth a lot more at 2015 rates).
The bank’s auditors, Ernst and Young, queried this guarantee in their report appended to the 2015 accounts. The building was listed as an asset available for sale, but the auditors found this unconvincing and doubted whether anything could be recovered from this supposed asset.
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