Mozambican company benefiting from hidden debt has not yet started tuna fishing

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Mozambican company benefiting from hidden debt has not yet started tuna fishing

9:46 CAT | 12 Dec 2018

File photo: Lusa

Tunamar, owned by one of the companies that received hidden loans endorsed by the Mozambican government, has not yet started tuna fishing, the activity for which it was created, the government admitted on Friday.

“It has not yet received the license [to fish for tuna],”, Minister of the Sea, Inland and Fisheries Agostinho Mondlane said at a press conference.

Minister Mondlane said that Tunamar was still preparing its boats for inspection. “To be able to fish in Mozambican waters the boats have to be inspected by law,” he explained.

The inspection verifies conformity with the health and safety requirements, both of the product and for the crew.

Mozambican prime minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosário said in April this year that Ematum, a Mozambican publicly-owned company involved in the hidden debt scandal, had created a new company, Tunamar, in partnership with the US company Frontier Service Group.

“In relation to Ematum, the Tunamar company was created in partnership with the United States Frontier Service Group,” Do Rosário said at the end of the parliamentary debate on the General State Account (CGE) of 2016.

The agreement between the companies will see the public company’s boats in operation later this year, he said.

Together with ProIndicus and MAM, Ematum benefited from more than two billion dollars of loans taken out between 2013 and 2014 and guaranteed by the Mozambican government.

The discovery of the loans took the country’s public debt to levels considered unsustainable.

Ematum used the money to buy 24 tuna-fishing boats, but its operations, like those of ProIndicus and MAM, was deemed unworkable by an international audit requested by Mozambique’s Attorney General’s Office, which still has an investigation into the case open.

Source: Lusa