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Monday, July 22, 2002 - Web posted at 10:39:43 am GMT

BANGUI - President Ange-Felix Patasse of the Central African Republic has issued a plea for help from the international community in the wake of a financial scandal which has virtually bankrupted the impoverished nation.

In making his plea at a meeting with the diplomatic corps last Monday, Patasse, in power since 1993, pledged to stop the corruption.

"It is to my great surprise, that I have learned that officials in the ministry of finance have been siphoning off large amounts of money, and that even the chief himself was involved," Patasse said Patasse was briefing the Bangui-based ambassadors on a vast political and financial scandal that has resulted in the arrest this month of country's finance minister, Eric Sorongope Zoumandji.

Although he is yet to be officially dismissed from his post, his arrest comes weeks ahead of a new loan, personally negotiated by Sorongope, with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The signing of the accord, which provides a desperately needed injection of cash into the nation's battered economy, has already been put off a number of times, most notably after an army-led attempted coup last year.

In recent weeks, more than 20 government officials have been arrested on suspicion of embezzling public funds. But according to the national assembly president, Luc-Apollinaire Dondon-Konamabaye, the "clean-up operation" was far from over.

It was thus that, in an aside to those representing "friendly countries" at the briefing that Patasse added: "Instead of letting me know, you kept quiet. "Yet in your reports to your nations or the IMF, you spoke of 'corruption from the top down'," he said.

"So from today, you must help me run the country, and run it properly," Patasse said.

Such was the extent of the financial scandal, said a source close to the president, that they were still to get to the bottom of the matter: "We are dealing with a mafia network here with people who are protecting one another."

According to United Nations figures, two-thirds of the the population of some 4 million inhabitants, are living in absolute poverty. "Contrary to many nations in sub-Sahara Africa, human poverty has worsened in the past decade," a UN report said.

"Widespread illiteracy, malnutrition, a health crisis accentuated by the HIV-AIDS pandemic, are the main causes." "Here we are poor despite our wealth," said an independent observer citing the landlocked country's abundant rain, forest resources, and gold and diamond deposits. - Nampa-AFP

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