Missing oil billions unexplained

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on the Angolan government to manage oil revenues better and allow for greater fiscal transparency, so that Angolans can enjoy the benefits of the country's resources. "More than US $4 billion in state oil revenue disappeared from Angolan government coffers from 1997 to 2002, roughly equal to the entire sum the government spent on all social programmes in the same period," HRW said on Tuesday. Although Angola's 27-year civil war ended in 2002, "an estimated 900,000 Angolans are still internally displaced. Millions more have virtually no access to hospitals or schools, [and] according to United Nations estimates, almost half of Angola's 7.4 million children suffer from malnutrition", the rights group noted. "While ordinary Angolans suffered through a profound humanitarian crisis, their government oversaw the suspicious disappearance of a truly colossal sum of money. This seriously undermined Angolans' rights," Arvind Ganesan, director of the Business and Human Rights programme at HRW, said in a statement. The government's failure to account for missing funds was rooted in its failure to keep accurate records of its revenues and expenditures. "Even if the government decided to fully disclose information [on oil revenue], it would not necessarily meet public needs, since its own record keeping is so poor," the lobby group added. An audit was needed because, while it was "possible to determine that funds are missing and that there are major discrepancies in government accounts ... it is very difficult to determine exactly how public funds were spent." The Human Rights Watch report - "Some Transparency, No Accountability: The use of oil revenue in Angola and its impact on human rights" - draws heavily on International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports and an unreleased "Oil Diagnostic" done by international accounting firm KPMG on behalf of the World Bank and the government. "Perhaps the most disturbing disclosure by the IMF in its March 2002 and July 2003 reports was the sheer size of unaccounted-for funds, which it describes as 'discrepancies' in government expenditures. The [IMF] report included a stark account of how much money had been spent for unexplained purposes and was effectively missing ... [which] totalled about US $703 million per year from 1997 to 2002, or about 9.5 percent of the country's GDP," the report noted. It added that the largest discrepancies occurred in 1997 and 1999, "when unaccounted-for monies totalled nearly US $1.8 billion (23.1 percent of GDP) and more than US $1.1 billion (18.4 percent of GDP) respectively". "The Angolan government says the international community should do more to fund schools, hospitals and courts, but it refuses to explain where billions of dollars of government revenue went," said Ganesan. He added that "any further aid to Angola should be conditional on very strict requirements for transparency in the government budget". The IMF said it would study the HRW report before deciding whether or not to comment on it. Similarly, the World Bank representative in Luanda was unable to give comment to IRIN. Attempts to get comment from the Angolan ministry of finance, as well as its embassies in South Africa and the United States, were also unsuccessful.