Ematum pays wage arrears – Mozambique

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Ematum pays wage arrears – Mozambique

7:08 CAT | 11 Nov 2016

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The Mozambique Tuna Company (Ematum) has finally cleared the last of its debt to its own workers, reports Friday’s issue of the independent newssheet “Mediafax”.

The workers demonstrated outside the company offices in Maputo in early October demanding their wages. They told reporters then that, ever since November 2015, the payment of wages had been irregular. By October the company owed its workers three months in wage arrears.

The protest worked, and the publicity it generated worked, and on Monday the last of the arrears were cleared.

But the future does not look rosy, since the company is not producing anything. The Ematum fleet is idle, and there is no sign of the boats resuming fishing any time soon.

“They only paid us on the 7th, and we think we will have more money problems in the company”, one of the workers told the paper. “Since January we have not put out to sea to fish. The boats are all paralysed and we don’t know why”.

Ematum is one of the three quasi-public companies which borrowed over two billion US dollars from European banks (manly Credit Suisse and VTB of Russia) in 2013/2014. The loans were illegally guaranteed by the Mozambican government, headed at the time by President Armando Guebuza.

The 850 million dollars lent to Ematum were used to buy 24 tuna fishing boats and six patrol boats from a shipyard in the French port of Cherbourg. No explanation has ever been offered for why so much money was spent on boats which, according to the French press at the time, only cost 200 million euros (about 230 million dollars).

Ematum’s target for 2015 was to fish 6,000 tonnes of tuna. In reality, it only fished, according to the government’s own figures, less than 300 tonnes, and with the current paralysis it is unlikely to do any better this year.

Ematum has not yet published its 2015 accounts, and even its website, which never contained much information, now seems to have collapsed. Attempts by AIM to open the Ematum site were met with the message “You don’t have permission to access”.

Source: AIM