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EDM admits negligence over Beira rubbish fee – Mozambique
7:50 CAT | 19 Oct 2016
CRV Magazine / Luis Amado, EDM spokesperson in Beira
Mozambique’s publicly-owned electricity company, EDM, has admitted negligence in its failure to transfer money owed to Beira Municipal Council, according to a report in Tuesday’s issue of the independent daily “O Pais”.
The matter became highly polemical last week, when, at the urging of the Council, the elected Municipal Assembly passed an amended budget for Beira, reducing expenditure, in part because the money from the rubbish collection fee had not reached the municipal coffers. The fee is added to consumers’ electricity bills, and is thus collected by EDM.
But since December 2015, EDM had not passed the money on to the Council. This problem generated rowdy scenes in the Assembly, when members of the ruling Frelimo Party claimed they had proof that EDM had been paying the Council regularly.
The opposition Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), which has a majority in the Assembly, demanded that Frelimo make copies of this “proof” available, which it only did at a press conference three days later.
The Frelimo first secretary in Beira, Lino Massinguine, showed EDM documents indicating that the money had been sent regularly to an account in the country’s second largest commercial bank, the BCI, in the name of “Beira Municipal Council, Department of Finance”.
But the Council retorted that it knew of no such account and that the correct Council account is held in the Bank of Mozambique, to which EDM, under its contract with the Council, had been regularly sending the payments up until last December.
At a press conference in Beira on Monday, EDM spokesperson Luis Amado admitted that the council was right, and that the money had been sent to an incorrect account. It was only after complaints from the Council, he said, that EDM realized “this was not the account where we normally deposited money for the municipality”.
What happened, Amado explained, was that at the end of 2015 EDM decided that all transfers to municipalities would be handled centrally, and so the EDM headquarters in Maputo had to receive from the EDM local delegations the account numbers where the money from the rubbish collection fee from various municipalities should be deposited.
During this operation a mistake was made. “When we were typing out the numbers of these accounts, we wrongly gave Beira Municipality an account that does not belong to it”, said Amado. There had been “some negligence in our financial directorate”, he admitted.
Amado also denied that EDM had provided Frelimo with the documents it had shown at last week’s press conference. “We didn’t supply any documentary evidence to Frelimo”, he said. “What we are saying is that the complaints by Beira Council make sense because, for eight months, we were transferring the money to an account which does not belong to the municipality”.
On 7 October, EDM paid all the missing money into the Council’s Bank of Mozambique account, in a lump sum of over 15 million meticais (around 195,000 US dollars). Amado said EDM is now trying to recover the money that was deposited in the wrong account, and those responsible for this blunder will be held responsible.
The Council will now be able to spend more, and so is presenting yet another amended budget for this year to the Municipal Assembly for its approval.
Source: AIM
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