Mozambique: Administrative Tribunal detects irregularities in 2024 State accounts – AIM

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Mozambique: Administrative Tribunal detects irregularities in 2024 State accounts – AIM

1:02 CAT | 23 Oct 2025

Image: O País

The Administrative Tribunal (AT), the body responsible for checking the legality of Mozambican public expenditure, has detected irregularities in the 2024 State accounts, claiming that the government, which was then headed by President Filipe Nyusi, failed to channel part of the gas revenues to the country’s sovereign wealth fund.

The sovereign wealth fund, which was established over the last year, is aimed at controlling revenues from the production of liquefied natural gas from offshore areas 1 and 4 of the Rovuma Basin, in the northern province of Cabo Delgado.

The fund has the mission of overseeing the revenue achieved in the first 15 years, of which 40 percent is earmarked for the fund and 60 percent for the State Budget.

In a document, filed with the Assembly of the Republic, the country’s parliament, the AT claims to have discovered misaligned accounts, lack of transparency and violations of various laws when auditing the 2024 accounts.

According to the document, Mozambique Rovuma Venture (MRV) – a joint venture owned by ExxonMobil, the Italian energy company ENI, and CNPC of China – paid the state about 33.6 million US dollars in taxes on hydrocarbon production. However, there was only confirmation that 24.6 million dollars was channelled into the State Budget, which means that the remaining nine million dollars is missing.

“It was not possible to certify the remaining amount as result of the absence of collection guides, essential documents for the breakdown of revenue and confirmation of collection to the CUT (Single Treasury Account). This fact confirms that these revenues were not channelled to the Transitional Account which substantially contradicts the government information”, reads the document.

In order to solve the problem detected, the Tribunal has called on the government to reorganize the General State Account, bringing clarity, accuracy, and simplicity to it. This means that the government has to substantiate the figures and present them again.

The document explains that the revenues collected from oil and gas projects is channeled to the transitional account opened at the Central Bank before being passed on to the Sovereign Wealth Fund and to the State Budget, which means that in this case “there is lack of institutional coordination and this harms the State.”

The TA also pointed to weak coordination between the main institutions involved in monitoring and overseeing mining and hydrocarbon activities, namely the National Mining Institute (INAMI), the National Petroleum Institute (INP) and the Tax Authority.

“This contributes to companies operating outside the control of the tax system and, consequently, to the loss of tax revenue and disparity in the information reported by these institutions. The National Petroleum Institute, as the regulator of the hydrocarbon sector, has been ignored by the concessionary companies when it makes demands in the audits it conducts”, the document says.

Source: AIM