Angola has reached out to a number of countries for help in recouping funds lost to corruption in the past, the country’s minister of state for economic coordination, Manuel Jose Nunes Junior, said yesterday.
Angola’s President Joao Lourenco pledged to crack down on graft and to reform the economy when he took office in 2017. “We are activating all the legal, judicial and diplomatic measures to ensure the repatriation of those resources,” Nunes Junior said during a briefing at think tank Chatham House in London.
He declined, however to give details on which countries the government had contacted. “We are requesting international cooperation to support this process, to help us look into the cases of corruption we already identified or the ones we have not found yet.”
Sub-Saharan Africa’s third largest economy is ranked as one of the most corrupt nations in the world at 165 out of 180 countries according to Transparency International. The minister also said he expected inflation rates to be in the double digits by 2022, and added that the government was pushing for more transparency in foreign exchange markets.