Mozambique reduced its debt to the Portuguese state by 17 million euros in the third quarter of 2025, bringing the total amount down to 308.7 million euros by September, according to official data compiled by the Lusa news agency.
The reduction was recorded over a three-month period, according to the latest public debt bulletin from Mozambique’s Ministry of Finance, referring to the third quarter of last year.
According to the document, Mozambique’s debt stock to Portugal stood at 325.8 million euros at the end of the second quarter of 2025, having fallen by 5.5% over the following three months.
At the end of the third quarter, among Mozambique’s bilateral creditors, the debt to Portugal was surpassed only by that to the People’s Republic of China, valued at 1,153.5 million euros, and to Japan, amounting to 346.9 million euros.
Despite the reduction recorded in 2025, Mozambique failed in 2024 to make external debt service payments totalling 47.3 million euros, with more than half of that amount owed to the Portuguese state, according to government data released in 2025.
In the public debt report for 2024, Mozambique’s Ministry of Finance stated that, at the end of that year, “state arrears referred exclusively to external debt”.
The same document stressed that “no arrears were recorded in the payment of domestic debt service”, clarifying that the total amount of arrears stood at 47.3 million euros, of which 40.5 million euros corresponded to principal and 6.8 million euros to interest.
“Among the main creditors, Portugal emerged as Mozambique’s largest bilateral creditor, with a total of 25.3 million euros in arrears,” the report noted. The Mozambican government later acknowledged, in June, that this debt had been fully settled in the first quarter of 2025.
