Mozambique: NGO blames hidden debts on drop in Corruption Perception Index

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Mozambique: NGO blames hidden debts on drop in Corruption Perception Index

4:44 CAT | 29 Jan 2019

Picture: Transparency International

The Centre for Public Integrity (CIP), Mozambique’s civil society organisation, on Tuesday, linked the case of the country’s ‘hidden debts’ scandal to the drop of Mozambique in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) by the non-governmental organisation Transparency International.

“For the third consecutive year, Mozambique has fallen in the CPI” which “cannot be dissociated from the ever-present illegal debts, commonly called hidden and the inability shown by the judicial [system] in making the suspects accountable for their practice,” the organisation said.

The index notes that since 2016, when the debts were fully revealed, the country’s position in the index has “sharply declined”: from 27 points to 23 and from the 144th position to 158th, with the number of countries assessed by the CIP growing from 168 to 183.

“The figures have shown, over the last three years of assessment, there is a total failure between political discourse and concrete measures to reduce corruption and its effects on Mozambican society,” the index concluded.

Mozambican justice has been investigating the case of the state’s hidden debts for three and a half years, but it turned out to be an investigation of US justice which detained Mozambique’s former minister of finance, Manuel Chang in South Africa, accentuating the criticism of the organisation on the instrumentalisation of the Mozambican authorities.

In addition to Chang, three former bank employees of Credit Suisse and an intermediary of the naval company Privinvest were detained in different countries in the last month.

According to the prosecution, the hidden debts guaranteed by the Mozambican state between 2013 and 2014 to three fisheries were the base for a scheme of corruption and money laundering to enrich several suspects.

Source: Lusa