Ematum contradicts Finance ministry

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Ematum contradicts Finance ministry

5:48 CAT | 07 Jun 2016

Notícias / Minister of Economy and Finance, Adriano Maleiane

The Mozambique Tuna Company (EMATUM) has denied statements by the Minister of Economy and Finance, Adriano Maleiane, that its fishing boats do not meet the specifications demanded by the European Union for the export of tuna to the EU.

Maleiane, cited on the front page of the Maputo daily “Noticias” on 23 May, told deputies of the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, that ten of the 24 EMATUM fishing boats are being refitted by a South African company so that they meet the technical specifications demanded by the European Union for boats that catch fisheries produce intended for the European market.

“What EMATUM explained to us”, Maleiane said, “is that, in order to export tuna to Europe, there are rules that must be followed. They sent inspectors to look at the boats as they are, and recommended adaptations to comply with the requirements”.

First, an attempt was made to negotiate the refitting of the boats with CMN, the shipyard in the French port of Cherbourg that built the boats, but that was too expensive, and so it was decided to hire a South African company to make the necessary changes.

“The costs involved in refitting the boats are high, hence the work is being done in phases”, said Maleiane. “Right now, we have part of the fleet ready, while other funds are being mobilized to pay for the rest”.

But EMATUM has now denied Maleiane, and placed a small item on its website saying “Unfortunately, misinformation led to statements from the Ministry of Finance, and then misleading press articles, concerning the building standards of EMATUM’s trawlers”.

The company, it adds, “wishes to confirm its utmost satisfaction with the quality of the fleet that was delivered as well as its building standards that fully satisfy EMATUM’s operational and commercial needs”.

The EMATUM statement, which is just 93 words long, concludes that the company “is currently working on finalizing all remaining licenses from the relevant authorities in the Republic of Mozambique in order to develop its fishing activities according to its objectives and plans.”

It took EMATUM a fortnight to respond to a front page article in the country’s main daily paper. And the EMATUM denial says nothing at all about the allegations that the boats do not meet EU specifications, or that a South African company is refitting the boats.

Oddly enough, although the original article in “Noticias” was in Portuguese, the EMATUM denial is in English. It is also the first time the EMATUM website has been updated in over a year.

There is nothing on the website about any recent fishing activities, and it s remarkably silent about the company’s financial woes, which led the government to take over EMATUM’s debts earlier this year, converting the original EMATUM bond of 2013, into a sovereign government bullet bond maturing in 2023.

Anyone who goes to the EMATUM home page is likely to be puzzled, since the first thing he will see is a quote in Latin – “Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt”. This appears to be nonsense, and is probably just a “lorem ipsum” – that is, a piece of text with no meaning, used merely to illustrate the graphic aspects of a document.

Yet the home page has been like this ever since EMATUM established its website. The item on the website on “Sustainable Fishing” (“Pesca sustentavel”) has nothing to do with fishing, and says the following: “This is a sample blog posting. If you log in to the site (the Author Login link is on the very bottom of this page) you will be able to edit it and all of the other existing articles. You will also be able to create a new article and make other changes to the site. As you add and modify articles you will see how your site changes and also how you can customise it in various ways. Go ahead, you can’t break it”.

There is a message from the company chairperson to the shareholders which begins with the words “the year 2014 was the start of a new phase in the life of the company”. 2014 – and we are now half way through 2016. In short, this website would be a disgrace to any self-respecting company.

The EMATUM mention of licensing raises the question: why are boats that arrived in Mozambique in 2014-2015 still not licensed?

According to the government’s figures, in 2015 EMATUM fished just 300 tonnes of tuna. Speaking to reporters in March this year, the Minister of the Sea, Inland Waters and Fisheries, Agostinho Mondlane, attributed this to the fact that by the end of 2015 only 12 of the 24 EMATUM fishing boats had been licensed.

He was confident that the other 12 ships would be licensed this year, and that the total tuna catch in 2016 would go to over 3,000 tonnes. But if, halfway through the year, the licensing is still incomplete, this projection could be unrealistic.

As for EMATUM’s boats, they were regarded with skepticism, long before Maleiane spoke in parliament.

Mozambique’s Nordic partners were suspicious of the boats (both the fishing boats and the six patrol vessels that were part of the same order) at least two years ago. A devastating article appeared in the Norwegian foreign aid magazine “Bistandsaktuelt” in June 2014, updated in April 2015.

It said that a Norwegian detective, Kato Stokkan, and Icelandic coastguard commander Einar Valsson, had written a report, commissioned by the Norwegian development aid body, NORAD, and by the Norwegian embassy in Maputo which, largely because of EMATUM, recommended that Norway should reduce its funding for fisheries inspection in Mozambique.

According to “Bistandsaktuelt”, the report stated that there was “a total lack of transparency” about EMATUM, which “makes it impossible to conduct a serious assessment of how the loan of USD 850 million will be allocated, and a loan of that size can have serious consequences for the country’s economic future.”

Stokkan and Valsson asked why Norway should use substantial resources to support fisheries inspectorate activities in Mozambique, while the Mozambican authorities were not willing to spend their own resources on fisheries inspection, but set up a company that took out a loan of 850 million dollars.

Stokkan and Valsson regarded both the EMATUM fishing boats and the patrol vessels as “unsuitable”. They believed that the six patrol boats were “not suitable either to protect the tuna fleet or to patrol the country’s territorial waters”.

As for the fishing boats, the report’s authors did not believe they were suitable for catching tuna since they were not large enough to be at sea for extended periods.

Source: AIM