The executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) has classified the hidden debt crisis in Mozambique as a criminal case that could have been avoided if there were public procurement transparency.
“It is a criminal problem and we are dealing with it,” said Vera Songwe, commenting on the debt scandal contracted by Mozambican state-owned companies, with a guarantee of €2 billion.
The three loans are being investigated by international judicial authorities and had been contracted without knowledge of Mozambican public powers.
The sovereign debt crisis caused a default in payment to creditors and forced the state to make new payment agreements.
“This is where the importance of transparency of contracts is revealed,” Songwe told Lusa.
“If there was a rule of transparency, these contracts would have been public and none of this would have happened.”
“We must have a multilateral approach” in these cases and promote the good management of public money, she said, defending that Mozambique should be considered an example not to be followed by the rest of the continent.
“There must be the rule of publicising public procurement” of states, she said.
“If we can see the contracts, we can know who is in good faith and who is not,” Songwe said, adding that the continent has too many similar cases of lack of transparency.
“This is one of the issues that must change,” she said, speaking to Lusa, on the sidelines of the annual meetings of the pan-African bank Afreximbank, which took place in Moscow
