Those who brought Mozambique's two privatised banks, the BCM and Austral, to ruin in 2000-2001 have nothing to fear from the World Bank.
That was the clear message from the bank's new country director for Mozambique and Angola, Michael Baxter, at his first meeting with the Mozambican press on Thursday.
AIM reminded Baxter of the near-collapse of the BCM and Austral under mountains of bad loans, and of how the interim chairman of Austral, Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua, had been murdered in August 2001.
At the time, donors demanded thorough investigation of the Siba-Siba murder. Baxter's predecessor, Darius Mans, declared that it was "critically important to show that no man can act beyond the law with impunity", and demanded "accountability for past bad lending practices".
There were demands for a vigorous debt recovery programme, to force those who had looted the banks to return the money.
There were donor calls that those responsible for the Austral collapse should face charges of fraud or malfeasance.
But that was in late 2001. Nowadays all those demands have been quietly dropped.
There has been no serious investigation of the Siba-Siba murder, and no-one has been arrested. The former directors of Austral are free men, in Mozambique or in Malaysia. No-one has been charged with any offence resulting from the near-insolvency of either the BCM or Austral. And the whole scandal has disappeared from donor agendas.
All Baxter had to say was that the World Bank is "very concerned and very involved" in the Mozambican financial sector.
The current proposal was for "a technical assistance project, to help further the financial sector, particularly in the area of banking supervision".
He believed that a forensic audit of Austral would go ahead, but the World Bank was not involved in that.
And that was it. Gone are the fine words about vigorous debt recovery programmes and the need to show that no-one is above the law. It's back to business as usual.
That amnesia is the order of the day in the World Bank was also clear when Baxter was reminded of how the Bank had wrecked Mozambique's cashew processing industry in the 1990s, when it had demanded, as a condition for loans, that the cashew industry be stripped of protection.
Baxter's response was: "We must take account of the past, but concentrate on the future".
Baxter said there are three main components to the Bank's 2004-07 Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) to Mozambique - namely "Improvement in the investment climate and support for the private sector, expansion of the provision of basic services, especially in rural areas, and support for capacity building in the public sector".
One constraint on investment is the lack of a properly functioning legal system that can enforce contracts and deal with business disputes. Baxter said the World Bank plans to spend five million US dollars "on a specific project to support the legal and judicial sector".
This was a technical assistance project which "will probably be focused on studies before any longer term programme to support the sector", he added.
As for World Bank road projects, which were frequently criticised in the past for lack of sustainability, Baxter insisted that current road projects in the Bank's portfolio "will include not only the construction of the facility but also the ongoing maintenance".
Baxter, an Australian national, has worked at the World Bank for 20 years, and has experience in west Africa (Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Cameroon), Latin America and India.
Fonte: AIM
