Nyusi inaugurates new central bank headquarters – AIM

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Nyusi inaugurates new central bank headquarters – AIM

6:54 CAT | 04 Jul 2017

Notícias

Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi on Monday inaugurated the new headquarters of the Bank of Mozambique in Maputo.

The three buildings are a towering new landmark in downtown Maputo. The largest of the buildings is an office tower 29 storeys tall, occupying a construction area of 25,900 square metres.

Each floor can hold 45 work posts, organised as an open plan. The upper floors also contain meeting rooms, training rooms, and a data processing centre.

Alongside there is a joint office block and multi-storey car park, which is 19 storeys high, covering an area of 56,000 square metres. The frontal part of the building contains offices with room for 12 work posts per floor.

At the back, the first 14 floors are a car park that can hold 690 vehicles. Above them are a library, a museum, space for archives, a canteen, a bar and a gymnasium. This building also contains water tanks and pumps for the entire complex, and fire fighting equipment.

The third, much smaller building is described as a “technical pole”. It is six storeys tall covering an area of 4,432 square metres. It contains the electricity transformers and back-up generators. All the buildings have two basements and are inter-connected.

Construction began in 2011, in order to modernise the central bank’s headquarters, improve working conditions for its staff, and guarantee a better provision of banking services to the state and to other public bodies.

The new complex cost 300 million US dollars. A senior source in the central bank told AIM that this all came from the bank’s own funds, and did not involve any debt. Although the capacity of the car park seems very large, this source was confident the bank would be able to use all of it. He said the Bank of Mozambique has 900 employees in Maputo alone, many of whom have their own cars.

The bank does not intend to abandon its old headquarters. This is a historic colonial building dating from 1964, and the governor of the bank, Rogerio Zandamela, pledged to maintain it.

In his brief inauguration speech, Nyusi praised the role of the central bank in checking inflation, and in halting the depreciation of the Mozambican currency the metical. At the height of the depreciation, in September last year, the metical fell to 80 to the US dollar. Vigorous intervention by the Bank of Mozambique, notably in sharply raising its benchmark interest rates, reversed the trend, and now there are about 60 meticais to the dollar.

Source: AIM