Kroll audit: MDM calls for prosecutions – AIM

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Kroll audit: MDM calls for prosecutions – AIM

7:48 CAT | 27 Jun 2017

The leader of the opposition Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), Daviz Simango, on Monday called on the Public Prosecutor’s Office to bring criminal charges against those responsible for the two billion US dollars’ worth of loans from European banks to the three security-related companies Ematum (Mozambique Tuna Company), Proindicus and MAM (Mozambique Asset Management).

The loans, dating from 2013 and 2014, were illicitly guaranteed by the previous government, under President Armando Guebuza. They added 20 per cent to Mozambique’s foreign debt, ensuring that the debt became unsustainable.

Simango was speaking at a Maputo press conference two days after the PGR had published the executive summary of the audit report on the three companies, undertaken by Kroll Associates, reputedly the top forensic audit company in the world.

Kroll found that much of the two billion dollars could not be properly accounted for. In particular, some of the assets acquired by the three companies appeared to be grossly overpriced. Kroll compared the prices as stated on the invoice provided by the companies with an evaluation made by an independent expert, and found a difference of 713 million dollars.

Furthermore, the companies were scarcely operational, let alone profitable, and there was no sign that they could ever run at a profit without further injections of money.

Simango said the loans had gone to companies “without basic facilities or a functioning structure, without management capacity, and with vastly over-invoiced procurement procedures”.

This meant that the forecasts that the companies would have earnings of 2.3 billion dollars by December 2016 “were merely false and deceitful, with the sole objective of deliberately dilapidating the state’s coffers”.

Simango noted that Kroll complained at a lack of cooperation from the three companies during the audit, refusing to provide some of the information requested, which led to omissions in the audit.

He argued that the Attorney-General’s Office (PGR) should have obliged the companies to provide the information instead of hiding behind excuses of “confidentiality” and “national security”. Simango pointed out that the PGR could have used “its constitutional prerogative as lawyer for the State to avoid publication of an amputated report”.

The failure of the companies to cooperate, Simango accused, “makes it ever more evident that the financial engineering behind the formation of these companies with unsustainable sums in unauthorised guarantees, was used to divert astronomical amounts, damaging the public interest and the Mozambican state, and making it impossible to service the public debt”.

The MDM leader urged public prosecutors to “use their professionalism and ethical principles”, and to speed up their current investigations “so that as soon as possible charges can be drawn up and those involved brought to trial”.

He added that the bank accounts of those involved in the loans and guarantees should be frozen that all assets acquired “from this illicit and corrupt financial engineering” should be seized, and that all assets and sums abroad should be repatriated to Mozambique.

Simango reiterated the MDM’s belief that the listing of the loan guarantees in the 2014 and 2015 General State Accounts was unconstitutional and should be declared as such.

As for paying off the debts, Simango said they should simply be repudiated. “We, the Mozambican people, should not pay a single cent of these debts, since they do not belong to us”, he declared.

“Justice should be done to save this nation from the webs of generalised corruption and from the capture of the state by organised crime”, he concluded.

Source: AIM