Ematum fails to pay its workers – AIM report

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Ematum fails to pay its workers – AIM report

5:37 CAT | 31 Jan 2018

Security guards patrol past the EMATUM fishing fleet docked in Maputo, Mozambique. REUTERS/Grant Lee Neuenburg

O País (File photo)

Once again the Mozambique Tuna Company (Ematum) is failing to pay its workers on time, reports the independent television station STV.

Ematum workers told STV they have not received their wages for December or January, or their holiday allowances, or the traditional New Year bonus known as the “thirteenth month” (because it is equivalent to an extra month’s payment of the basic wage).

One worker, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, pointed out that the 2018 school year begins on Friday “and we still haven’t bought school materials or uniforms for our children. Some of us haven’t even managed to enrol our children in school”.

The workers had a meeting on Tuesday with the company’s Director of Human Resources “but they didn’t tell us anything concrete. They said that, if possible, they’ll pay us on Friday, but there’s no certainty”.

Although most of these workers are sailors or fishermen by profession, their only task currently is to guard the Ematum boats. The boats are just anchored at Maputo fishing port, and do not put out to sea to fish. The conditions in the boats are deteriorating – the workers took the STV crew aboard to show them that the boats are now infested by cockroaches and other insects.

As for the possibility of American businessman Eric Prince, chairperson of the Frontier Service Group, investing in Ematum, the workers say they have been told nothing about this.

Prince visited Maputo in December and declared that his company will enter the Mozambican fisheries sector through Ematum, but did not state how many money he is prepared to invest.

Prince is a founder of the US security company Blackwater (now known as Academi). Prince founded Blackwater in 1997 and was its chief Executive Office until 2010. It achieved notoriety in 2007 when a US court convicted four Blackwater employees of massacring 14 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad.

Ematum is one of three companies (the others being Proindicus and MAM, Mozambique Assets Management) which benefitted from loans of over two billion US dollars from the European banks Credit Suisse and VTB of Russia in 2013 and 2014. These loans were illicitly guaranteed by the Mozambican government of the time, headed by President Armando Guebuza. The guarantees were illegal because they smashed through the ceilings on government guarantees laid down in the 2013 and 2014 budget laws.

Despite this huge injection of funds, the companies are not functioning and cannot possibly repay the loans. Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the government accepted an independent international audit of the three companies, undertaken by Kroll Associates, reputedly the world’s foremost forensic auditing company, earlier this year.

Kroll’s audit report is a damning indictment. It revealed invoicing procedures that were grossly inadequate. The invoices for the assets and services provided by the Lebanese Privinvest Group to each of the three companies were just a page long.

Kroll says it spoke to an industry expert who said invoices should include a clear and detailed description of all the assets and services provided. “The invoices provided to Kroll do not supply sufficient detail to gain comfort that the documents accurately reflect the true price of these assets and services, and therefore do not allow accurate accounting records to be maintained by the company”, the audit report noted.

Kroll checked the state of the Ematum assets and found that, while they had mostly been delivered, they were not functioning properly. Ematum had a fleet of 24 fishing boats (21 longliners and three trawlers) “but none of the assets are fully operational for several reasons, including a lack of trained crew, and the limitation on available working capital”, Kroll said.

As a result Ematum has done hardly any fishing, and has struggled to pay wages to its workers, who have occasionally gone on strike to force the management to pay them.

Source: AIM