South African aviation consultancy, Fly Modern Ark, which is managing Linhas Aéreas de Moçambique (LAM), has made allegations that the airline lost over US$3 million (R57 million) through embezzlement practices within the airline.
LAM is currently undergoing a restructuring with the assistance of Fly Modern Ark.
According to clubofmozambique.com, a signed letter by LAM’s Director General, João Carlos Pó Jorge, stated that the LAM board was unaware of the alleged embezzlement being carried out through automatic payment terminal machines or point of sale machines (POS) in ticket shops, claiming that the POSs did not belong to the airline.
According to Jorge’s letter, LAM’s management was taken by surprise when the allegations were published in the media.
The letter says the management denounces the claims that LAM’s finance department is at fault because it is responsible for all transactions made to and from the carrier.
The investigation started almost two weeks ago when Sérgio Matos, LAM’s Restructuring Project Manager, noticed that although ticket sales were increasing, the airline’s accounts were not reflecting this.
“We’re selling, but the company isn’t getting all the money, and in the last three months of evaluations, we’ve seen that the difference we were getting was between US$2 million (R38 million) and $3 million. In December alone, we had a deficit of $3,2 million (R61 million),” explained Matos.
He said the investigation had recorded further suspicious cases in the collection of cash from POS in shops and anomalies in the fuelling of LAM’s aircraft.
“We did a lightning job with LAM’s internal security to collect all the POS and, of LAM’s 20 ticket sales points, we had collected 81 POS by Sunday. There are some shops where the managers themselves don’t recognise the machines and say they don’t even know who they belong to.”
Matos found that the security companies contracted to collect the cash from the POSs were sometimes only submitting standard cash collection reports to the airline days following the cash collection.
Furthermore, the investigation found that some aircraft with a maximum fuel capacity of about 80 000 litres were recorded to have been fuelled with 95 000 litres. This anomaly resulted in suspicious fuel shortages, delayed flights and debt owed to fuel providers.
In addition, Matos denounced the discovery of an account in Malawi with $1,2 million (R23 million), which no-one in the company has access to.
The restructuring contract between the Mozambiquan government and Fly Modern Ark, which appointed a team of managers including Matos into LAM, will end in April. Thus far, there is no indication about whether the contract will be renewed.
