Africa-Press – Mozambique. The current Mozambican government, under President Filipe Nyusi, far from sabotaging the three illicit companies set up by the security service (SISE), tried to rescue at least one of them, MAM (Mozambique Asset Management), according to Nazir Aboobacar, the SISE officer put in charge of administration and finance at MAM.
Aboobacar was giving evidence before the Maputo City Court on Monday evening, during the trial of 19 people accused of various crimes in connection with the three companies.
MAM was supposed to be a shipbuilding and repair company, with shipyards in Maputo and Pemba. But by 2016 it was producing nothing and therefore receiving no revenue.
Aboobacar recalled that he had accompanied the then head of SISE economic intelligence, Antonio Carlos do Rosario, one of the main accused in the current trial, to a meeting of the Council of Ministers (Cabinet), where Nyusi asked why the three companies were so unproductive. (Aboobakar gave no date for this meeting, but it must have been in late 2015 or early 2016).
Rosario was reluctant to answer Nyusi’s question, but Aboobacar claimed he told the President that MAM was unable to operate because the premises for its Maputo shipyard were still occupied by another company, Somonav, which had a contract with the Mozambican state.
Nyusi then instructed the Minister of Economy and Finance, Adriano Maleiane, to unblock the problem. Aboobacar said Somonav refused to move until the Mozambican state paid for the work it had done. A meeting was held with Somonav’s lawyer, and the government agreed to pay up.
MAM could then move into the shipyard and, according to Aboobacar, the then Transport Minister, Carlos Mesquita, promised to find clients to make the MAM shipyard viable.
In his testimony in October, Rosario told the court that members of Nyusi’s government had “sabotaged” MAM and the two other companies, Proindicus and Ematum (Mozambique Tuna Company). But Aboobacar could see no sign of this sabotage – instead, “Mesquita opened all the doors for us”, he said. “At my level there was no sabotage”.
But despite the helpful government attitude there was no happy ending. A company known as Maputo Shipyard was set up, owned 99 per cent by MAM and one per cent by GIPS, the company set up to run the SISE social services.
But there was not enough work. Under the original contract, the MAP shipyards were to have built ships. But in reality all that Maputo Shipyard did was “repairs to small and medium sized boats”, said Aboobacar.
This work, he added, was sometimes enough to allow Maputo Shipyard to pay its wages bill.
Aboobacar said the sole supplier for MAM, the Abu Dhabi based group, Privinvest, did not transfer the technology agreed in the contract, which, he believed, would have allowed Maputo Shipyard to undertake more skilled work.
Privinvest did transfer a million dollars to MAM in mid-2014. Aboobacar said this money was used for start-up costs – wages, rent for the MAM offices, two vehicles (one for Maputo and one for Pemba), computer and communications equipment, office supplies and the like.
“It didn’t last long”, said Abookacar. Once the million dollars had run out, MAM depended on transfers from GIPS to pay its running costs. So, instead of raising money for SISE, MAM relied on SISE, via GIPS, to meet its costs.
Furthermore, MAM could not be audited. Aboobacar said the audit company Ernst & Young, refused to write an audit report, because it objected to the turnkey contract MAM had signed with Privinvest. Under that contract, there was no breakdown of prices by item, and the auditors thought that made their job impossible.
Asked by prosecutor Sheila Marrengula why he thought MAM had failed, Aboobacar replied simply “there was no working capital”.
He thought the company might have worked if the Privinvest promised transfer of technology had happened. But it never did.
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