Source: MACAU BUSINESS
The Angolan government needs to make changes to its legal framework to present financial information in a more detailed manner in its next report on the extractive industry, the international consultancy Ernest and Young (EY) has recommended.
This is one of the main recommendations made by the independent organization in the First National Report on the Extractive Industry to be submitted on Saturday to the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI), of which Angola has been a member since 2022.
According to Manuel Mota, from EY, there is this legal limitation at the moment in Angola, which makes it impossible to present details by individual taxpayer in this report for the 2021 tax year.
Manuel Mota said that the aim of this initiative, among many other aspects, is to bring transparency to the payments that are made between the extractive industry, entity by entity, and the government.
“The information that was presented was done in aggregate form and what we hope is that there will be a development,” said Manuel Mota, emphasizing the need to overcome this limitation with a view to reconciliation “that allows for total transparency in what is sought, total transparency in payments, and reconciling what the industry says it pays and what the government says it receives.”
For his part, the executive director of the National EITI Coordination Commission, José Malanga, emphasized that the legal framework in force in Angola makes it impossible to disclose data in a detailed manner, and as a result, the Ministry of Finance has set up a technical group to resolve this situation.
“With the international EITI we reached an agreement that the second report will be made with unilateral data from the industry, and in the next ones, who knows, the country will provide a solution as to how to publish the data in a more detailed way,” he emphasized.
José Malanga stressed that the second report will begin to be drawn up on 1 January 2024, but with the 2019 EITI standard, using the same requirements as the first report.
This report, according to Manuel Mota, did not cover any information related to human rights in the extractive industry, situations sometimes denounced by communities and civil society, because its focus is more on financial transparency with the government.
In his speech, the secretary of state for mineral resources, Jânio Correa Victor, called the presentation of this first report “a historic milestone” for Angola and its extractive industry.
“By complying with the requirements of this initiative we are demonstrating our commitment to the best international practices in the management of these resources,” said the Angolan government official, adding that the next reports will be delivered on 16 September 2024, 16 December 2025 and 16 December 2026.
Jânio Correa Victor said that the extractive industry had always been criticized for the amount of money that was involved.
“There were and always have been some suspicions, both nationally and internationally since it is an industry that moves a considerable amount of money, and it was said that there was no access to the accounts or that the transactions were not transparent,” he said.
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