WIKILEAKS, MOZAMBICAN BANKS AND AMERICAN IGNORANCE

Among the supposed “revelations” in the US diplomatic cables, signed by the former US charge d’affaires in Maputo, Todd Chapman, and publishing by the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks, is a list of companies allegedly owned by Mozambican President Armando Guebuza.Chapman claims that Guebuza has shares in a number of banks, namely the BCI, Mocambique Capitais, Moza Banco, and Geocapital. There are a number of problems with this list – notably the fact that neither Mocambique Capitais nor Geocapital are banks.Geocapital is not even Mozambican – it is the holding company of the Macau billionaire Stanley Ho, and describes itself as a bridge between China and the Portuguese speaking world. In addition to Ho himself, the main shareholders are Portuguese investor Jorge Ferro Ribeiro, and a second Macau businessman Ambrose So Shu Fai, who is also a Committee Member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body to the Chinese government.Although Geocapital is not a bank, it invests in banks – in this case in Moza Banco, one of the most recent of Mozambican banks, which began trading in 2008.At the time Chapman was writing (late 2009/early 2010), Moza Banco had three shareholders – Geocapital, Mocambique Capitais, and Mozambican businessman Antonio Almeida Matos. Almeida Matos had just one share, simply because there was a legal requirement for three shareholders.
Guebuza is not a shareholder of Moza Banco. Mocambique Capitais is the driving force behind Moza Banco, and was the brainchild of a former governor of the Bank of Mozambique, Prakash Ratilal. It is a private shareholder company, open to any Mozambican businessman or other professional. It started life in 2001 with 13 shareholders, and now has about 300. Armando Guebuza is not one of them.The rumour that Guebuza is a shareholder of Mocambique Capitais can be traced back to an article that appeared in the Maputo newsheet “Correio de Manha” on 28 December 2005. The article was reprinted in the blog “Mocambique para todos”, and was eventually picked up by the Paris-based “Indian Ocean Newsletter” (ION) in its issue of 27 March 2010.At this point, Ratilal wrote a polite letter to the ION, pointing out that Guebuza was not a shareholder of Mocambique Capitais, and that claims by ION that Moza Banco had made losses of 10 million US dollars in 2008 were the reverse of the truth.Ratilal said that Moza Banco had started banking activities in June 2008, and by the end of 2009 could report “sizeable profits”. Anyone who did not believe this could look at the reports from the consultancy company KPMG, which audits Moza Banco’s accounts. The editor of the ION, Francois Soler, had the professional decency to issue a correction in the next issue.The shareholding structure of Moza Banco is about to change after a deal to bring the Portuguese company BES Africa into the bank. BES Africa is a holding company of the Banco Espirito Santo group.The deal has been carefully crafted to ensure that the Mozambican shareholders remain in control. As from January, according to Ratilal, Mocambique Capitais will have 50.4 per cent of the shares in Moza Banco, BES Africa 25.1 per cent, and Geocapital 24.5 per cent. The bank’s capital is scheduled to increase from 15 million to 20 million US dollars in January and to reach 30 million dollars by June. Currently Moza Banco has just two branches and 63 workers – the expansion plan is to reach 30 branches and about 300 workers by 2013.Mocambique Capitais and Moza Banco also lay a strong stress on ethics. In his letter to the ION, Ratilal wrote that all candidates for membership of Mocambique Capitais “have to present their identity card or company’s registration and declare that the origin of their funds do not result from illicit activities or money laundering”.
The company’s articles of association go further and state that any shareholder in Mocambique Capitais will be obliged to sell off his shares if he is found guilty of money laundering “or other crimes that may seriously damage the operations of the company”.This is far removed from the corrupt schemes imagined in Todd Chapman’s cables, which paint a picture of an economy dominated by Armando Guebuza, and mired in drug trafficking and money laundering. As for the BCI, this is Mozambique’s second largest commercial bank. Once again, it is easy to check the list of shareholders and see that Armando Guebuza’s name is not there.
The BCI is dominated by Portuguese capital. The major shareholder is the Portuguese state bank, the Caixa Geral de Depositos (CGD), with 51 per cent. A second Portuguese bank, the BPI (Portuguese Investment Bank) holds 29.55 per cent of the shares. The only Mozambican shareholder in the BCI is the Insitec group, chaired by Celso Correia. Elsewhere in the same cable Chapman claims that Guebuza is the majority shareholder in Insitic. But in fact Insitec was set up as a family company, and the people who own it are mostly members of Correia’s family. Guebuza does not figure in the list of Insitec shareholders.Chapman claims he obtained the information about Guebuza’s supposed business interests from a source whose name has been redacted by Wikileaks. However, the information in the cable makes it easy to identify the source, and AIM has spoken to him – he categorically denies saying most of what Chapman attributes to him. In particular, he said he knows nothing about companies in which Geubuza may hold shares.But more important than Chapman’s dishonest use of his sources, is the apparent US embassy ignorance about Mozambican banks. For the information on the shareholding structure of Mozambican banks is publicly available. A few phone calls, or a few minutes browsing on the Internet would have given Chapman full information on the ownership of all Mozambican banks.Instead, he chose to retail cocktail party gossip put in the mouth of a source who has subsequently denied even mentioning the country’s banking system to Chapman.Was Chapman deliberately trying to damage Mocambique Capitais, Moza Banco and the BCI in the eyes of the State Department? Or are his cables simply the product of an incompetent and unprofessional diplomat?