The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development said this Wednesday, November 1, in Parliament that the National Fund for Sustainable Development (FNDS), which is currently the subject of a judicial investigation, is managed transparently and is subject to accountability.
Celso Correia was responding to a question from the parliamentary caucus of the Democratic Movement of Mozambique (MDM), the third largest party, about the management of the FNDS, a funding mechanism for rural development initiatives, whose management has been criticized and is the subject of a judicial investigation.
“The FNDS has been governed by governance rules and principles of transparency and accountability, and has been the subject of independent audits,” he said, stressing that the entity has already been subject to 20 independent audits since its creation.
At the moment, according to the minister, “through public tenders, three national companies have been hired to audit the years 2016 and 2017, 2018 and 2019, respectively, and the external audit for the years 2020, 2021 and 2022 is underway”.
In addition, the government official said that the FNDS has made a robust intervention in financing rural development initiatives, which has allowed the mechanism to have a portfolio of 250 million dollars, compared to the two million dollars it inherited from its predecessor.
“To give you a better idea, we’re saying that the FNDS is now responsible for 30% to 40% of national public investment,” he said.
In July, a source from the Central Office for Combating Corruption (GCCC) told Lusa that it was investigating the award, by public tender, by the FNDS of five plots of land for “Community Delimitation and Basic Land Use Planning and Issuance of Community Delimitation Certificates” to a consortium called Terra Vital Consortium, for an amount of more than 19.4 million dollars.
“A routine process will be triggered, which is the investigation of a potentially illicit public occurrence, but we never assumed beforehand that there was a crime there,” said a GCCC source at the time.
