Witnesses in the scandal case of Mozambique’s “hidden debts’’ told the court that the boats had been in poor condition.
The former Ematum Director of Operations, Silvestre Soludo, said CMN knew that the fishing boats it was building did not meet Mozambican requirements, yet it failed to correct the defects.
Soludo agreed with Januario that Mozambican inspectors found a large number of defects in the boats they inspected in Cherbourg, and gave CMN a list of corrections that should be made. But when the first five boats arrived in Maputo in April 2014, the corrections had not been made. The CMN promises proved worthless.
The Maputo City Court heard on Monday that the first five fishing boats of Ematum, (Mozambique Tuna Company), built in a shipyardsin the French port of Cherbourg, failed a health and hygiene inspection in May 2014.
Ematum is one of three fraudulent companies at the centre of the scandal of Mozambique’s “hidden debts’. They obtained over two billion dollars in loans from the banks Credit Suisse and VTB of Russia, only possible because the government of the day, under the then President Armando Guebuza, issued illicit loan guarantees.
A senior officer in the Ministry of the Sea, Inland Waters and Fisheries, Filipe Januario, who was a fisheries inspector in 2014, said he was part of a team sent to Cherbourg to inspect the boats from the health point of view before they put to sea.
They were given very little information about Ematum before they set out. They asked for blueprints of the boats, but these were not provided.
The Cherbourg shipyard, Constructions Mechanisques de Normandie (CMN), owned by the Abu Dhabi based group Privinvest, was building 24 fishing boats (21 longliners and three trawlers) for Ematum, but by May 2014 only five were ready.
Januario’s team looked at them and drew up a long list of defects – as if the shipyard had paid no attention to the Ematum specifications, and had never read the Mozambican legislation on protective measures for foodstuffs of aquatic origin.
Among the many problems noted were the lack of a toilet in the captain’s bathroom, the lack of containers for holding accumulated fisheries produce while waiting for subsequent stages of processing, the lack of recipients for disposing of fish guts, the lack of a system for continuous recording of temperature, the presence of non-insulated electric cables on the upper walls near the processing table. One possibly life-threatening defect was that there was no way to open the cold storage chambers from the inside.
Other problems included the lack of adequate storage space for cleaning products, and difficulties in cleaning and disinfecting some of the floors.
Januario’s team gave the Cherbourg shipyard a long list of recommendations – changes that had to be made to the Ematum boats in order to bring them into line with Mozambican legislation. Then Januario left Cherbourg – and never set foot on an Ematum vessel again. So he did not know personally whether his team’s recommendations had been implemented.
But he learnt from other sources that non-waterproofed wooden material that should have been removed from the cold stores was still there when the boats arrived in Mozambique, and that problems with the floors in the freezing tunnels had not been corrected.
