Foreign Minister denies pocketing Moroccan aid money

The foreign minister of Sao Tome and Principe has denied allegations that he misappropriated nearly US $500,000 of Moroccan aid money, but he has raised a political storm by saying it was spent by the president bypassing government controls. Returning from a visit to the United States, Foreign Minister Ovidio Pequeno told reporters on Thursday that Morocco gave the money directly to President Fradique de Meneses to spend at his discretion. “It was a one-off direct aid payment to the Presidency of the Republic worth 4.5 million dirhams (US $497,000) for the purchase of goods, equipment and official vehicles, not an institutional aid payment to Sao Tome and Principe within the context of bilateral cooperation,” he said. On 31 December, the news magazine Equador accused Pequeno, a close associate of the president, of misappropriating 450,000 euros of Moroccan aid money. Equador said he diverted the money into an account controlled by the Sao Tome embassy in Gabon without the knowledge of Prime Minister Maria do Carmo Silveira and then into a series of other bank accounts in Europe. The prime minister ordered an immediate inquiry and dispatched a team of auditors to the embassy in Libreville to check its financial dealings. Pequeno’s comments appear certain to embitter the already tense relations between the president and the government, which is dominated by the MLSTP-PSD, the largest party in parliament. Sao Tome faces parliamentary elections in March and presidential elections in September, in which Meneses is expected to seek a second five-year term. The MLSTP-PSD, which ruled this former Portuguese colony for 16 years as a one-party state after independence in 1975, opposed his election in 2001 and is virtually certain once more to run a candidate against him. Meneses has been at loggerheads with a series of six governments over the past five years, but parliament recently blocked his proposal for a referendum on proposed changes to the constitution that would strengthen the powers of the president. Pequeno, a former journalist with the Voice of America, is an independent minister in the present cabinet without party affiliation. He pointed out that previous heads of state had received direct payments of cash from friendly foreign governments and said there was nothing unusual about Meneses doing the same thing. But Pequeno admitted that some of the recently publicised Moroccan payment had been used to buy two official cars for his own ministry. In a thinly veiled attack on the foreign minister, the MLSTP-PSD said in a statement there were indications that other large sums of aid money had been diverted from the normal government channels in an irregular way, supposedly to fund diplomatic activities.