Luanda – praag.org

Corrupt Angola has $80 billion of debt, some ‘hidden’

LUANDA, Angola. As Mozambique cracks the whip on officials and cronies allegedly involved in the multibillion-dollar debt scandal, string indications of deals between Angola and global companies involved in the scandal is increasingly bringing to question the credibility of President Joao Lourenco’s already-debatable drive against corruption and presents Angola as risky for foreign investors.

The direct involvement of the Lourenco, who was the Minister of Defense when the transactions at the centre of the emerging controversy were carried out, makes the revelations even more damning to his government and his quest to rid the oil-rich nation of rampant graft and address economic decline.

It has emerged some engagements were during his tenure as president. He has been in power since September 2017.

EXX Africa, the business risk intelligence firm, has unearthed indications that the Ministry around the same time as the US$2 billion debt scandal emerged in fellow ex-Portugal colony Mozambique.

Between 2013 and 2014, Mozambique state-owned security companies borrowed from some international financiers but the government only disclosed most of the debt in 2016.

According to findings by EXX Africa, Angolan Ministry Defense reached a €495 million contract to buy ships and maritime construction capacity from Privinvest, in a contract strikingly similar with ProIndicus and MAM, the companies at the center of the ‘hidden debt’ scandal in Mozambique.

Among other prominent transactions, it has emerged that in 2015, Simportex – a company of the Angolan Defense Ministry, which entered into a partnership with Privinvest, signed contracts, totaling €122 with Finmeccanica, now called Leonardo SpA, for acquisitions that Privinvest is said could have made itself.

In December that year Simportex apparently signed contracts equivalent to for the purchase and sale of equipment, substitutes, and to provide installation and training to equip a national center and three regional maritime coordination centers, as well as to install several control stations, replicators of signal and means of communication in the Angolan coast, according to EX Africa.

It also included the reported purchase and sale of two ultra-fast patrol vehicles, spare parts, tools and training services between the Ministry of National Defense and the company Whitehead Sistemi Subacquei SPA, with local currency equivalent to €7,3 million.

In the same year, Angola entered another agreement with the French subsidiary of Privinvest, CMN, to provide a hydroelectric project but the scheme never materialized to date.

In addition to the agreements, there are indications of a relationship between Lourenço and ProIndicus. Sources reported that during his tenure as minister from 2014-17, he visited the Mozambique project to secure a similar package for his country.

Investigations ascertained a broader network of individuals and entities were likely to have been involved in the relationship. The name of former Vice-President Manuel Vicente has again cropped up.

In June 2017, a Portuguese court ruled that Vincente should face trial over bribery allegations he bribed a magistrate with $810 000 in order to shelve investigations into his deals at the named Sonangol Group, the oil firm he headed between 2009 and 2012.

Local analysts concurred with EXX Africa that indications of deals secured by Angola raised serious doubts about the credibility of Lourenco’s anti-corruption drive, embarrasses the president and risk and undermines the country’s prospects as an investment destination.

Lourenco’s campaign has largely culminated in a purge of family members of his predecessor, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, and government officials linked to the former president.

“The revelations of links with companies synonymous with Mozambique’s debt crisis indicate Angola might have a similar problem brewing, equivalent if not deeper than Mozambique’s,” said analyst Miguel Sanz.

A2 Global Risk, the think-tank, stated that questions had been asked why the government has excluded certain figures from the clampdown, which seemed at odds with Lourenco’s public rhetoric.

“With politically exposed persons who have moved to the new administration still likely to dominate Angolan businesses until Lourenço’s efforts bring returns, where does this leave foreign companies seeking investment opportunities in Angola?” the firm asked rhetorically.

EXX Africa stated that besides possibly embarrassing Lourenço and undermining government’s anticorruption platform, mounting evidence risked straining relations with relations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Last December, IMF approved a three-year $3,7 billion loan seen as a boost to revive an economy facing a decline owing to the global upheavals in the oil sector. Angola’s economy is overly-reliant on oil.

Angola’s is struggling to control its foreign and domestic debt, which is estimated at nearly $80 billion.

IMF and foreign donors cut off support to Mozambique. It sparked a currency collapse and the Southern African country defaulting on sovereign debt.

In recent days, a son former President Armando Guebuza, the ex-head of Mozambique’s intelligence services and the chairmen of three firms linked to the debt scandal were among several individuals arrested for their alleged roles. These beleaguered chairmen were ex-members of the State Security and Information Service (SISE)

President Felipe Nyusi last week dismissed Deputy Minister of Economy and Finance, Maria Isaltina Lucas, for her alleged involvement.

Former Finance Minister, Manuel Chang, has been held in South Africa since he was arrested in December.

Mozambique and the United States have both want him extradited to the respective countries.

– Pedro Agosto, CAJ News

MPLA’s British handler dies

The British MI6 spy, Michael Wolfers, died in London at the start of a private dinner in one of London’s most exclusive clubs to celebrate the milestone 75th birthday of his close friend of 56-years’ standing, Lord Bragg, on October 15.

He was a devout Marxist for the Foreign Office in London.

Wolfers, working undercover as a journalist, left The Times in 1973 and in 1975 became an adviser on political and media matters to the MPLA in Luanda.

The MPLA was dominated by a network of well-educated, often prosperous whites, like Wolfers, working to end “colonial rule”.

Michael Wolfers, who never married, will be cremated at the Jewish cemetery in Golders Green, London, on Tuesday, October 21, 2014.

In the past two decades he had travelled widely as an election observer for the European Union, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the Carter Center, monitoring polls in countries such as Rwanda, Bosnia, Madagascar and Togo.

Five years ago he had an apartment built in in Lomé, the capital of Togo, which he grandly named “Villa Wolfers”.

Lara Pawson recently challenged the superficial account of the violent repression by the MPLA in her book In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre, London: I.B.Tauris, 2014.

Pawson’s gripping study of the events of 27 May 1977 in Angola show the utter ruthlessness of the MPLA, advised by the likes of Wolfers.

Her meticulous account demonstrates the extreme ferocity of the MPLA response – the killings, torture, mass purges and also the way that personal scores were settled under the guise of purging the party of alleged “factionalists” and “racists”.

Most importantly, it shows how the killings of perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 party members or supporters, the cloak of secrecy thrown over the events and their aftermath and the all-pervading fear that resulted, have helped maintain the dominance of a small clique and its clients within the MPLA and through the party’s hegemony over Angola and its resources.

The book starts with events the author witnessed in Luanda in 2000 and how people even two decades later or longer feared expressing open opposition because of the lessons of 27 May. The extent of the killings, torture, detentions and purges left an indelible mark on Angolan politics.

Wolfers was one of 16 guests savouring the first course at the men-only Garrick Club when an evening of celebration turned into one of horror.

Despite attempts by paramedics for more than an hour-and-a-half to revive him, he was declared dead before he arrived at St Thomas Hospital on South Bank, close to his home in Waterloo.

“We’d been close friends for 56 years,” Lord Bragg told a reporter from the Daily Mail. “He made close friendships. He was much loved. He was very highly regarded.”

Michael Wolfers was the product of exclusive and expensive primary and secondary education and was an outstanding scholar at Wadham College, Oxford University in the late 1950s.

It was there he met young Bragg who came from an English working-class background but who went on to become one of Britain’s best known media figures.

After an apprenticeship on a north of England newspaper, Michael Wolfers joined The Times and was that paper’s correspondent in various parts of Africa until 1973.

When in London, Wolfers was a familiar figure at Chatham House. He was fluent in Portuguese and several other languages and a well-respected authority on both the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique.

Malaysian jet not the first to vanish

For those suggesting that the disappearance of Flight 370 is unparalleled in aviation history, Vocativ would like to remind them that another large Boeing jet took off from an airstrip in Angola in 2003 and hasn’t been seen since.

Big difference: That jet had no passengers aboard, but the circumstances surrounding its disappearance are pretty strange nonetheless. Two mechanics—American Ben Charles Padilla and Congolese assistant John Mikel Mutantu—boarded the Boeing 727 on a Luanda airstrip to get it in shape for its next flight.

Neither had a pilot’s license, which is why flight controllers were stunned when the plane taxied to the runway and then took off.

Leased to deliver diesel fuel to diamond mines, the 727 carried 10 500-gallon fuel tanks and a few passenger seats in its cabin.

Was it Padilla? Mutantu? Both? Hijackers who had slipped aboard? Investigators still don’t know, and no sign of the plane has turned up despite an intense international hunt.

Some of the theories being tossed around in regard to Flight 370—it crashed into the ocean, it landed secretly, it got shot down by some nation’s military—were similarly floated back then.

But “we never knew for sure where it went,” concluded an earlier investigation by Air & Space magazine. It was at the time the largest aircraft to go missing, but the Malaysian jet will take that distinction if it doesn’t turn up.

After her brother disappeared from Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport in Angola, Benita Padilla-Kirkland tried to persuade the FBI to re-open his case. In 2005, the FBI had closed its case.

She believes she has the “new information” agents told her they require. But she suspects that the agency already has more information than agents will admit to

According to press reports, the aircraft began taxiing with no communication between the crew and the tower; maneuvering erratically, it entered a runway without clearance. With its lights off and its transponder not transmitting, 844AA took off to the southwest, and headed out over the Atlantic Ocean. The 727 and the two men have not been seen since.

Retired U.S. Marine General Mastin Robeson, commander of U.S. forces in the Horn of Africa when 844AA went missing, says word of the 727 “came up through the intelligence network.” According to Robeson, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) considered moving U.S. fighter aircraft to Djibouti on the Red Sea coast, where the Combined Joint Task Force shares a base with the French military.

Robeson continues: “It was never [clear] whether it was stolen for insurance purposes…by the owners, or whether it was stolen with the intent to make it available to unsavory characters.”

Source: Newser