Mozambique: REVIMO announces resumption of toll fees from Monday
FILE - For illustration purposes only. [File photo: O País]
Over two billion meticais (over 31.2 million US dollars, at the current exchange rate), intended for the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, were misused in 2020, according to a report published this week by the Mozambican Ministry of Economy and Finance.
According to the report, an inspection team from the Ministry detected the irregular use of 2.014 billion meticais, equivalent to 12.8 per cent of the entire funding for Covid-19 in 2020. Mozambique’s foreign partners disbursed, via the government’s Single Treasury Account, 23.756 billion meticais to fight the pandemic, of which 20.667 billion was executed.
Among the irregularities, the Ministry report said, were payments that did not follow the legally established hiring procedures, contracts that were not authorised in advance or were presented outside the legal deadline, payments without documentation justifying them, or which should never have been made in the first place, and expenditure that was not eligible for outside financing.
Hiring was the area with the most serious irregularities. In this area, over 1.888 billion meticais of expenditure did not follow established procedures. This was nine per cent of the total amount executed in 2020.
The contracts that were not submitted to the Administrative Tribunal for prior authorisation, or were submitted late, only amounted to slightly more than 42 million meticais.
Some of the money wrongly spent can be recovered. The payment of expenses to people who were not eligible is now being deducted from their wages, or they are being notified to repay. Likewise, the suppliers of equipment that turned out to be defective are being told they must give the money back.
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