Mozambique Cenbank knows nothing of Pro-Indicus ‘secret’ loan

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Mozambique Cenbank knows nothing of Pro-Indicus ‘secret’ loan

3:26 CAT | 11 Apr 2016

In File Club of Mozambique / Banco de Moçambique's new building in Maputo

The governor of the Bank of Mozambique, Ernesto Gove, has said he knows nothing about any debt owed by an obscure state company named Pro-Indicus.

So far, the only written source for this alleged debt is an article in the “Wall Street Journal” (WSJ), published on 3 April. This claimed that, in 2013, at around the same time as the Mozambique Tuna Company (EMATUM) issued bonds for US$850 million, fully guaranteed by the Mozambican state, Credit Suisse and the Russian VTB, the banks that handled the bond sale, made another enormous loan to a Mozambican state company, also guaranteed by the government.

This loan was supposedly for “at least US$787 million” – although the numbers cited by the WSJ are less than clear. It says that the initial loan to Pro-Indicus was for US$622 million to fund the purchase of naval vessels and radar installations. The bank is said to have approached investors in 2014 to expand the loan to US$900 million. The article does not give a final figure for the loan.

The WSJ cites an anonymous “person familiar with the loan”, who claimed that it would have to be repaid in full by 2021.

EMATUM bondholders were allegedly kept in the dark about the Pro-Indicus loan. Credit Suisse did not inform them about it until after more than 85 per cent of them had accepted the government’s offer to swap the EMATUM bonds for government sovereign bonds with a longer repayment period but at a higher interest rate.

But the fact that Ernesto Gove has categorically denied all knowledge of any Pro-Indicus loans must raise doubts about the accuracy of the WSJ story. Not only did Gove know of no such loan, but he had never even heard of Pro-Indicus.

Cited in Friday’s issue of the independent newssheet “Mediafax”, Gove said “The public debt is handled by the Ministry of Finance. We, as the central bank, obtain the information to see what is the general situation of indebtedness. I have no information on this, and I am hearing about it from you”.

Gove is cited as saying much the same in the daily paper “O Pais”. “The Central Bank needs the data to study the sustainability of the country’s debt”, he said. “But we have no record of this debt”.

Finance Minister Adriano Maleiane told “O Pais” that he had read the WSJ article, but had not yet analysed it. He promised to comment on it in the near future.

Could a loan of US$787 million really have been kept secret from the Central Bank for almost three years? Or have the WSJ and its anonymous source made a mistake?

If indeed the Central Bank was not informed of such an enormous debt, that is a major scandal, and a legacy from the last government, headed by President Armando Guebuza, that is even more embarrassing than the EMATUM bond.

Pro-Indicus certainly exists. The company was set up on 21 December 2013, and its Statutes were published in the official gazette, the “Boletim da Republica” on 8 January 2013. Unusually for such announcements, the names of the shareholders are not given. However, from the internet page of Monte Binga, a company 100 per cent owned by the Mozambican Defence Ministry, we learn that Monte Binga has a 50 per cent holding in Pro-Indicus.

The company’s Statutes state that the objectives of Pro-Indicus include “the design, financing, implementation and management of integrated systems of air, space, maritime, river, lake and terrestrial security”, and “the provision of services in the area of the security of infrastructures”.

Source: AIM