Mozambique: LAM authorised to carry cargo to Lisbon after five-month wait

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Mozambique: LAM authorised to carry cargo to Lisbon after five-month wait

12:26 CAT | 29 Apr 2024

FILE - For illustration purposes only. [File photo: Lusa]

The Confederation of Business Associations of Mozambique (CTA) said on Monday that Portugal has just authorised Mozambique’s state-owned airline LAM to carry cargo from Maputo to Lisbon after five months of waiting.

In a statement, the CTA said that this difficulty was one of the themes of the business mission it organised with businesspeople last week in Porto and Lisbon in order to ‘obtain authorisation’ from the Portuguese Tax Authority ‘for the export of goods’ via the aircraft of Mozambique Airlines (LAM), which resumed connections between the two capitals in December, with two flights a week.

The statement said, ‘The LAM plane, with a capacity of 32 tonnes, used to fly empty of cargo from Maputo to Lisbon but came back full from Lisbon to Maputo, allowing Portuguese companies to export to Mozambique via LAM cargo.

‘After several meetings, LAM, which was part of the business mission, finally received the information that Mozambican companies’ use of LAM’s cargo service to export to Portugal has now been authorised,’ the CTA statement added.

The business confederation ‘believes that this measure will have a major impact on the competitiveness of Mozambican exports’.

The manager responsible for restructuring the Mozambican airline LAM told Lusa on 24 April that Portuguese customs did not allow cargo carried on LAM flights from Maputo to enter Lisbon.

‘We didn’t fly to Lisbon for 12 years, and then, on 12 December, we started flying again. We submitted the request to the Portuguese customs authorities to have the EOR, the European Union authorisation document for cargo entry, and five months later, we still haven’t received an answer. But cargo from Lisbon to Maputo is travelling normally,’ said Sérgio Matos.

Speaking to Lusa on the sidelines of the Mozambique-Portugal Business Forum in Lisbon, the manager responsible for restructuring LAM emphasised that the problem is the Portuguese authorities’ lack of response and delay in providing information.

‘The process has been submitted. Maybe this is the normal delay, but as we don’t have any information, we’re getting worried because we’re entering our fifth month of operation and we don’t have authorisation to bring cargo from Mozambique to Portugal,’ he added.

‘Our traders in Mozambique are impatient because they think it’s a prohibition on the Portuguese side not to bring in cargo, benefiting only Portuguese traders, but we, as LAM, don’t see it like that. We just wanted to know the minimum or maximum time it takes to get authorisation,’ Sérgio Matos added at the time.

Asked if TAP, which also operates direct flights between Lisbon and Maputo, is authorised to bring in and take out cargo, he said that it was.

Earlier, the president of the CTA, Agostinho Vuma, had called on governments to harmonise the legislation that promotes trade relations and to remove obstacles and announced that Mozambican exports to Portugal via LAM would be impossible.

‘They should harmonise business incentive measures so that Luso-Mozambican business can flow more smoothly. For example, after the introduction of measures and economic acceleration that allowed for greater demand for tourism, there was an opportunity to resume direct flights between Lisbon and Maputo, but the lack of authorisation from the tax authority to send cargo from Maputo to Lisbon is a problem,’ said Agostinho Vuma, during his speech at the opening session of the same forum.

Source: Lusa