By Nick Mann | 28 March 2012
Campaigners have urged the International Monetary Fund to withhold a $130m loan to Angola until the southern African country fully explains a $32bn accounting ‘discrepancy’.
Human Rights Watch and the Revenue Watch Institute together wrote to IMF managing director Christine Legarde on Monday, calling on the fund’s executive board not to approve the loan when it meets in Washington DC later today.
They said ‘key outstanding issues’ related to transparency and the use of funds which the Angolan government has not ‘adequately addressed’. In particular, they highlight a December 2011 IMF report that revealed a $32bn ‘discrepancy’ in Angola’s public accounts for 2007–2010.
In January, according to the campaigners, the Angolan government denied that the funds – equivalent to a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product over that point – were ‘missing’. Instead, it attributed the discrepancy to ‘insufficient record[s] of the uses of oil revenues’.
Angola’s government has taken steps to improve transparency and management of its oil sector in recent years, the groups noted, but its explanations ‘do not adequately explain the discrepancy’.
They also fail to ‘constitute evidence that Angola’s public financial management practices have definitively and irreversibly changed for the better’, the letter said.
Arvind Gansean, business and human rights director at Human Rights Watch, said: ‘It is very troubling that the government of Angola spent $32bn without properly accounting for it. Angolan authorities need to fully and publicly explain what they did with those billions in taxpayer funds before getting another cent from the IMF.’
The latest $130m loan represents the final tranche of a $1.4bn financing arrangement between the IMF and Angola that partly coincided with the period in question, the letter said.
Karin Lissakers, president of the Revenue Watch Institute, added: ‘The IMF should insist that the government account for those funds before disbursing another $130m. Giving the government millions more in financing when it hasn’t publicly accounted for billions sends the wrong message.’
The campaigners also call on the Angolan government to implement safeguards to combat corruption and mismanagement, in particular ending all off-budget revenues and spending by the state oil company, Sonangol.
