Searchers located the black boxes of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed in the sea off Lebanon last month killing 90 people, Transport Minister Ghazi Aridi said on Saturday.
“The boxes have been found under the rear part of the fuselage” which was found on Saturday morning, the Lebanese minister told AFP.
“Lebanese army divers have gone down to retrieve them, but this operation will take time,” said Aridi.
“We have to be cautious because we must preserve the data contained in the boxes,” he added.
Aridi stressed special measures would be taken to bring to the surface the flight recorders in a way to avoid any damage that could be detrimental to the information they contain.
The minister also said he had been informed by the Syrian authorities that debris from the plane had been found in the Mediterranean Sea off the western city of Lattakia.
He said earlier that the search vessel, Ocean Alert, had located the rear sections of the aircraft’s cabin.
The sections found were between 10 and 12 metres (33 and 40 feet) long, and at a depth of 45 metres (150 feet) off Naameh, 12 kilometres (seven miles) south of Beirut, Aridi said.
The Boeing 737-800 went down before dawn on January 25, just minutes after take-off during stormy weather from Beirut airport. It was bound for Addis Ababa with 83 passengers and seven crew on board.
No survivors were found from Flight 409, and only 15 bodies have so far been recovered.
Aridi said he hoped other sections of the plane would soon be found, along with bodies of the remaining victims still thought to be strapped to their seats.
Of the 15 bodies found, nine were Lebanese, five Ethiopian and one Iraqi. Fifty-four Lebanese were on board the aircraft.
The Lebanese military said on Saturday that “pictures are being taken” of the located section of fuselage with a view to raising it.
Flight recorders are usually placed in the rear of commercial airliners.
Lebanese officials have said the captain was instructed by the control tower to change to a certain heading, but that the aircraft then took a different course.
Experts have told AFP that the stormy weather may not have been the only reason for the crash, and that the aircraft may have had engine or hydraulics problems.
(Source: AFP)
By Peter Bosshard | International Rivers
On Januar 13, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister [genocidal dictator] Meles Zenawi inaugurated the Gilgel Gibe 2 scheme, the country’s biggest hydropower project. “It is possible to speed up development without polluting the environment,” Zenawi proudly declared as he cut the ceremonial ribbon. Yet this was wishful thinking.
Due to shoddy preparation, the project had already been delayed by more than two years. And less than two weeks after the inauguration, the project’s core component, a 26 kilometer-long tunnel, collapsed partly. Power generation had to be stopped for several months. Ethiopia’s hydro sector demonstrates that there are not shortcuts to sound infrastructure development. Cutting corners does not “speed up development,” but produces costly mistakes.
Gilgel Gibe 2 has a price tag of 374 million Euros and a capacity of 420 megawatts. The project works without a reservoir, but channels the water discharged from the Gilgel Gibe 1 Dam through a long tunnel and a steep drop directly to the valley of the Omo River. The undertaking was plagued by shoddy management from the beginning. In violation of Ethiopian law, the government negotiated the project contract with the Italian construction company Salini without competitive bidding. No-bid contracts for public works projects are a big red flag of corruption. The Gilgel Gibe deal was awarded without a feasibility study, and construction started without the legally required environmental permit.
In violation of Italian law and against the recommendation of its own evaluators, Italy’s Ministry of Development Cooperation awarded 220 million Euros of aid money for Salini’s no-bid contract. Gilgel Gibe 2 was “the biggest development fund released to a single project in the history of the Italian Cooperation,” the Ministry says proudly. The European Investment Bank, which is notoriously weak in appraising power projects, contributed another 50 million Euros, and the Ethiopian government funded the remaining 104 million Euros.
Gilgel Gibe 2 was supposed to be completed in Dec. 2007. Yet the poor preparation soon took its toll. Deficient geological studies had overlooked sandy soils and aquifers in the rock. The tunnel boring equipment got stuck in the mud, and the engineers had to redesign the tunnel’s path. As we heard, the aqueduct collapsed only 12 days after its inauguration, nine kilometers inside the mountain.
Who pays the price for such development failures? The dubiously negotiated contract for Gilgel Gibe 2 exempts Salini from geological risks, so the Ethiopian electricity consumers and tax payers ended up paying for the cost-overruns. Salini will certainly try to shift the blame for the tunnel collapse to Ethiopia once again. In the meantime, the country’s poor remain without electricity, and the environment gets spoilt for nothing.
Italy’s Campagna per la Riforma della Banca Mondiale has documented the numerous legal problems and shortcuts of the Gilgel Gibe 2 project in detail. The Campagna’s Caterina Amicucci comments that aid projects like Gilgel Gibe 2 “not so much address a country’s urgent development needs, but subsidizes a major Italian company.” The Campagna and International Rivers have asked that the bill for the latest disaster be paid by Salini and not Ethiopia’s taxpayers.
Gilgel Gibe 2’s dodgy deal is the rule, not the exception in Ethiopia’s hydropower sector. The contract for the slightly smaller Tekeze Dam was awarded in 2002, and power generation was supposed to start in 2007. Yet in this case, the ground on which the dam was being built was too weak — a fact which a proper feasibility study would have found in advance. Landslides caused further delays, and the project was commissioned two years late in 2009.
The story doesn’t end with Gilgel Gibe 2 and Tekeze. In July 2006, the government awarded a $2.1 billion contract for the Gibe 3 Dam — its biggest infrastructure project ever — to Salini through direct negotiations. Again there was no competitive bidding. Again project construction started without an Environmental Impact Assessment and an Economic, Financial and Technical Assessment. If built, the Gibe 3 Dam will devastate the fragile ecosystems of the Lower Omo Valley and Lake Turkana, on which 500,000 poor farmers, herders and fisherfolk rely for their livelihoods. Even though the project violates Ethiopian law and their own safeguard policies, the African Development Bank and the World Bank are currently considering support for the project.
Will the collapse of the Gilgel Gibe 2 be a wake-up call for the World Bank and the African Development Bank? Latest news indicates that the financiers, who refused to get involved in Gilgel Gibe 2, may yet shy away from the dodgy Gibe 3 deal. They know that their credibility is on the line.
By Yilma Bekele
It took an article on LA Times to help me gather my thoughts together. I knew there was some thing missing in the story unfolding in front of me. The article by Alexandra Sandels and Borzou Daragahi of Los Angles Times brought it all in focus.
ET409 is a tragic story. We all felt the pain. Although death is a natural occurrence, an accident like ET409 has unpleasant effect on all of us. It is death magnified. ET409 was death in the family. Sudden unexpected death.
Then the passenger manifest started to come out. There were eighty passengers and seven crewmembers. Twenty-two of the passengers were Ethiopians returning home from Lebanon. As far as the foreign press is concerned they were ordinary passengers. Business people or vacationers returning home. But we Ethiopians know better. It was no surprise to us that they were all women. No one has to tell us they will all be young. We have close relatives like that all over the Middle East. They are the surplus Ethiopians.
This group of Ethiopians returned home in a body bag. Some will stay in the Mediterranean. All will have a special place in our hearts. On the other hand talk to any Ethiopian Airlines employee and they will tell you the horror stories of the returnees from the Middle East. The trip back home should be renamed the ‘horror express’. Some return with deep psychological scars, some with visible body scars and some in a casket. Some sit there like zombies unable to talk, afraid to move unsure of themselves. Some come back home to die. They will never recover from the deep humiliation and abuse.
They all go there to better themselves and their family. There used to be a long line stretching all the way to the street and sidewalk in front of the old courthouse in Ledeta. It was a line of girls registering a name change to go to the Middle East. Having a Muslim name was a plus. Then came Woyane and institutionalized the process. They called it employment opportunity and started to charge for the service. Woyane makes a lot of money selling citizens. It is a very lucrative business. It is true they started selling maids to the Middle East before they graduated to selling children to the West in the so-called ‘adoption’ scam.
So our sisters flock to the Middle East to make something of their life. In Lebanon, Dubai, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia etc. they join others like them from the Far East in perpetual servitude. They enter a region with no laws, minimal view of human right and total absence of justice. The plight of our people in the Middle East is an open secret. The suffering and humiliation have been told and retold plenty of times. They jump from high-rise building and kill themselves. They kill their tormentors in self-defense. Unable to understand their agony their brain shuts off.
So the ones that died in the accident are the carriers of this horror. Despite all this happening to them our sisters are on of the highest contributors to Woyane’s 10% growth that is told and retold again and again. Let us take Lebanon by itself. They say there are over twenty five thousand Ethiopians working there. Let us assume each one sends US $100.00 per month. That is US$ 2.5 Million per month and US $30 Million a year. In Ethiopia that will be $390 Million Bir. A lot of money if you ask me. That is what you would call a cash cow.
How does the Ethiopian government appreciate the contribution of these citizens that cling to their motherland despite the threat to their well-being. Silence and indifference is their response. So it was a surprise to see the Woyane Foreign Minster in Beirut after the accident. There he was sitting with the Lebanese Prime Minister. Why did he go there is a good question? Did he go there to gather his people around him and console them in this time of grief? Did he go to meet with friend and family of the victims and tell them their government’s commitment to help in the search and rescue effort? Did he go there to give them moral strength? Did he go there to hold their hands and be with them? I am afraid the answer is none of the above. In Woyane’s Ethiopia those who rule don’t mingle with those ordinary Ethiopians. His Excellency does not have time for uneducated simple maids.
Then why did he go? Well he went as his capacity as Board Chairman of Ethiopian Airlines. Yes he is the Chairman of the Board. Don’t ask what his qualifications are for such a high post. Does his resume shows his talent in managing a little kiosk? Does it show his education and capacity for such a demanding job? Does he have a track record of growing a business? The answer is none of the above. His qualification is his membership in TPLF. Thus he went there because some Lebanese officials used to degrading our Ethiopian sisters upgraded their contempt and questioned the skill of the pilots and crew. The Foreign Minster went there to calm the nerves of the Lebanese officials. He went there to protect the integrity of his cash cow called Ethiopian Airlines. Why they don’t change the name to ‘Woyane Airlines’ is a mystery. The only thing Ethiopian is the name. In America they call it truth in advertising.
Thus it was no surprise to see my Diaspora friends decrying the racism of the Lebanese in the ill treatment of those in grief. Despite the fact that the horrible condition of the Ethiopian guest workers is known to all of us some of us choose to vent our rage on the people of Lebanon. I agree with Fekade, it is totally ‘a misplaced rage’. Our rage should be directed at those that allow such conditions to exist. Our indignations should be directed at the root of the problem. We should be careful in our wholesale condemnation of the Lebanese people. We should be aware that there still are over twenty five thousand of our people working there. We don’t want to contribute for their further ill treatment. Our quarrel is with the TPLF regime that considers the rest of us as trespassers in our own land. We fix our house first and the world will shower us with respect and love. As Henry Thoreau said ‘there are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots…’ don’t tell me you are still hacking at the branches! That is so yesterday my friend. Rage against Lebanon is hacking the branch.
The following is a letter from DLA Piper, a law firm in Washington DC.
February 5, 2010
Mr. Elias Kifle
Publisher, Ethiopian Review
Annandale, Virgina
Re: January 27, 2010 On-Line Article Entitles “Ethiopian billionaire’s daughter faces stoning in Saudi”
Dear Mr. Kifle:
This firm represents Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi and his family.
We are writing to you regarding the content of your article entitled “Ethiopian billionaire’s daughter faces in Saudi,” appearing on-line in the January 27, 2010 edition of the Ethiopian Review. Your article states that the “identity of the alleged Saudi Princess given secret asylum in the United Kingdom early last year has been revealed” as Sarah Mohammed Al Amoudi, daughter of Sheikh Mohammed Al Amoudi. The alleged Saudi Princess referenced in your article is not the daughter of Sheikh Al Amoudi, The information in your article making the link between the alleged Saudi Princess and the Al Amoudi family is false, highly inflammatory, and is a defamatory statement.
We insist that you immediately cease and desist from making this false and defamatory statement. We also demand that you issue an immediate retraction of the article by issuing a formal statement disclaiming the link between the alleged Saudi Princess and the Al Amoudi family, by removing the reference to Sheikh Al Amoudi and his family from this on-line article, and by issuing an apology to Sheikh Al Amoudi and his family.
If you are represented by counsel, have your counsel contact us immediately to discuss this very serious matter. If you are not represented, you may contact us directly to confirm arrangements for the retraction and apology.
Very truly yours,
Mary E. Gately
DLA Piper LLP
500 Eights Street, NW
Washington DC 20044
[email protected]
T. 202 799 4507
F. 202 799 5507
————————————
Ms. Gately,
Here is my formal statement:
Screw yourself. Same goes for all DLA Piper “lawyers.” Stop bluffing and face me in court.
Yours truly,
Elias
By Abebe Gellaw
In mid-January, the ailing Development Bank of Ethiopia (DBE) declared once again that it is in need of rescue fund. The business weekly, Addis Fortune, reported that the bank called on the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) to inject more capital to refill its empty cash registers.
Though the health of all state banks has been in dramatic decline within the last ten years, crisis-ridden DBE has been in much more serious trouble carrying a huge burden on its shoulders in the form of non-performing loans. Much of these loans are taken out by crooked “borrowers” like the Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigray (EFFORT), which is infamous for defaulting on the multi-billion birr loans it has been raking out from state banks. [EFFORT is now under the control of Meles Zenawi’s wife, Azeb Mesfin.]
In mid-December, Addis Fortune reported that DBE “loaned” a whopping 1.7 billion birr ($141.6 million) to a privileged company, Messebo Cement Factory, one of the many companies owned by EFFORT. Messebo’s business plan was an expansion project, to build a second factory that will extend its market monopoly in the cement business. “The money, 96 million in euro [141.6 million dollars], has been obtained entirely as a loan from the Development Bank of Ethiopia (DBE); only 15 percent of this money was required in local currency,” the paper reported.
“The civil work has been completed. The machinery are now coming from China,” Brehanu Werede, acting general manager of the project, boasted.
But the interesting twist in the story is the fact that while ailing DBE has been on the verge of collapse, its incompetent management team and board, filled with the ruling TPLF loyalists and hirelings, clearly flouted the basic rule of banking by approving EFFORT’s greedy loan applications.
As a result of its crisis, cash strapped DBE has been unable to finance essential and productive entrepreneurial projects. It is turning down loan applications from serious entrepreneurs that have little political and ethnic leverage, while funnelling meagre resources to a borrower that has been deliberately confusing loans with grants.
Even more surprisingly, it happened at a time when DBE has once again pressed the red button for rescue injection from the national treasury. It doesn’t make sense to undertake such a mammoth expansion project on the part of Messebo at a time when the cement market is predicted to reach a saturation point with the opening of a dozen of new factories including Sheik Mohammed Al-Amoudi’s Derba Midroc Cement Factory, which is expected to start production at the end of this year.
DBE has a long but difficult history. Over one hundred years ago, the founder of the first bank in Ethiopia, Emperor Menelik II (1844-1913), realized the critical role banks play in development endeavours. When Emperor Menelik inaugurated Bank of Abyssinia on February 15, 1906, he undoubtedly envisioned it to grow, multiply and serve generations to come. That bank played a critical role to push his modernization agenda. It is also credited for financing the construction of the only railway line in Ethiopia, the Ethio-Djibouti railway, which currently finds itself on the verge of extinction.
Emperor Menelik had also set up another bank, solely committed to enhancing development and trade by providing badly needed financial facilities, despite the fact that resources were extremely meager. In 1909, the emperor launched the Societe Nationale d’ Ethiopie Pour le Development de l’ agriculture et de Commerce (The Society for the Promotion of Agriculture and Trade).
Since its establishment, the bank has undergone major restructuring and re-naming at least eight times. During the reigns of HaileSelassie and Mengistu Hailemariam, the bank did not register any dramatic growth nor faced critical illness. After the fall of the Derg, the bank saw dramatic changes as its non-performing loans had reportedly reached as much 94 per cent. In 2003, it was re-established as the Development Bank of Ethiopia. In July 2009, the bank declared that it completed the controversial Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) which has been allegedly used to push the agenda of the ruling elite to tighten its monopolistic grip on every key institution in the country.
It is an open secret that the Development Bank of Ethiopia has been experiencing more difficulties under the Meles regime than its predecessors. The main cause of its dire problems, as mentioned above, is related to the fact that the amount of loans it disburses and the amount it recovers have been showing a widening gap that cannot be easily filled with capital injections from external and internal sources.
According to the data obtained from the bank, from 1972 to 2009, DBE disbursed 13.3 billion birr in loans but could only collect 8.39 billion birr from borrowers. Laden with heavy burden of debts, the bank is making recurrent loan requests from internal and external sources. In fact, had the bank been in healthy condition, borrowing from external and internal sources would not have been a problem due to the fact that the bank was set up to operate as such.
Under normal circumstances, no bank in any part of the world will ever lend money to any borrower with terrible credit history. But the crooked client called EFFORT is a powerful part of the establishment being run by senior TPLF officials, including the Prime Minister’s wife, Azeb Mesfin, who has been appointed by her husband to control EFFORT’s multi-billion business empire.
No state bank official can dare say “No” to any amount of “loan” requests, no matter how outrageous it could be, to the Queen of Mega and her entourage. Obviously, a bank official handpicked by Meles can hardly be expected to refuse to oblige whenever his wife demands a loan or grant be issued, no matter how much or whether it is in local or hard currency. In fact, thanks to the unlimited power accorded to the tyrant’s wife, she has been known to employ real politik to get whatever she desires.
Dr. Seid Hassan, Economics and business Professor at Murray State University pointed out the fact that he had even come across credible complaints about Azeb Mesfin’s underhanded business activities including using her power and influence to force potentially competitive entrepreneurs to “sell” their start-ups to her or her business partners in order to enable her various companies and “joint ventures” to enjoy market dominance.
Last year, DBE celebrated its 100th anniversary in the presence of Zenawi’s octogenarian figurehead, President Girma Woldegiorgis, who recently celebrated his 86th birthday. As the celebration was in high tempo, interesting figures that were rarely made public were released by the officials.
One of the most eye-catching figures came from Abay Weldu, TPLF Executive Committee member as well as Deputy President of the State of Tigray, and DBE Northern Region Manager, Hadush Gebregziabher. At the bank’s diamond jubilee, both of them excitedly disclosed that since the fall of the Derg, the bank loaned over 3 billion birr to Tigray region, i.e. EFFORT and its affiliate business projects, as reported by TPLF’s own media outlet, Walta Information Centre.
What makes the story much more interesting is the fact that from 1970 to 2009, the bank loaned 13.2 billion birr to private businesses and government projects. Out of the total outlay disbursed in four decades, it was learnt that the bank loaned nearly 8.5 billion birr since the fall of the Derg, which was 19 years ago. That makes TPLF the biggest beneficiary of the “loan” bonanza taking the lion’s share, i.e. nearly 40 per cent of loans, from the struggling bank, and its other external and domestic sources of capital, including the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia and the National Bank of Ethiopia.
In addition to the 3 billion birr plus loan, Messebo Cement Factory was recently awarded 1.7 billion birr (147.6 million US dollars). That simply means that in the last 19 years, the TPLF and its ethnic affiliates took out over 4.7 billion birr of fund from the coffers of DBE, not to mention other states banks that are also victims of TPLF money grab scheme.
TPLF companies are currently undertaking “expansion” projects with funding from struggling state banks. But it is quite obvious that the funding should have been allocated fairly and equitably to finance serious development projects throughout Ethiopia including underserved and neglected regions.
In fact, there is also an incredible and outrageous twist to this saga. DBE reportedly had planned to lend around 2.4 billion birr this fiscal year. Of the 2.4 billion birr, 1.7 billion birr has already been granted to Messebo’s so-called expansion project. In other words, the privileged Messebo has been allowed to take well over 70 percent of the total outlay allocated this year to finance businesses and public projects in the whole of Ethiopia, while DBE has fallen in the habit of dialing for emergency services and rescuers. This huge inequality gap in TPLF’s Ethiopia clearly symbolizes Meles Zenawi’s ideology of gangster capitalism that has been designed to benefit only a selected few members of the ethnic junta in power.
As the TPLF leadership has been consistently claiming, EFFORT does not belong to the people of Ethiopia. Abadi Zemu, Sebhat Nega and even Gebru Asrat, who claims to be struggling against Meles Zenawi’s injustice have shamelessly claimed that EFFORT belongs to anyone with Tigrian blood as if being a Tigrian was a privilege to own multiple companies without any contributions. They are telling us that the business empire, which enjoys a huge array of privileges including unrestricted loans, exemption from external auditing, exemption from paying taxes, belongs only to the people of Tigray despite the fact that the EFFORT conglomerate is completely under the control of Meles, his wife and his closest cronies like Abadi Zemu, Arkebe Ekubay, Yohaness Ekubay, Getachew Belay, et al.
In a recent interview with VOA’s reporter Girmay Gebru, Abadi Zemu, who is the CEO of EFFORT and Executive Committee member of the TPLF, has said that Messebo Cement Factory already commands 40 per cent of the cement market in Ethiopia. Messebo was set up in 1995 with a registered capital of 240 million birr. It is puzzling why DBE approved Messebo’s 1.7 billion birr loan in foreign exchange to construct a second factory at a time when businesses are closing down due to severe shortages of hard currency and loan facilities.
It was just a few months ago that the international media jokingly reported about Ethiopia’s Coca-Cola drought as the East African Bottling Company, which was forced to suspend production of the global brand and laid off its employees as the state banks claimed to have run out of their foreign exchange reserves. Tens of thousands of business owners, especially those engaged in the import sector, have been seriously affected by the foreign exchange crunch.
The repeated firing and hiring of senior management officials within the last decade also reveal that DBE’s future has been uncertain and shaky. The bank has also been subjected to scathing criticism for being too generous on risky loans to EFFORT and failing to insist on repayment with interests in time. No matter where the bank is going, the fact that TPLF is draining state banks to undertake its discriminatory, monopolistic and illegal business projects will remain a thorny issue, and even a source of future conflicts for generations to come as the ongoing looting and corruption is too naked and unprecedented in the history of the poor nation.
(The writer can be reached at [email protected])
