Mauritanian president Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz on Tuesday met the manager of Islamic Development Bank (IDB) group, Mohamed Ali, with their discussions focusing on a power project in the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott.
The meeting took place just before president Aziz left for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for the 22th ordinary session of African Union (AU) heads of state and governments.
“I told the president of the Republic the attention the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) pays to the project to extend the capacity of the electricity plant of Nouakchott,” Mr Ali said.
He told reporters after the meeting that the Bank was ready to complete the project that would generate enough power for export to the Senegalese capital, Dakar.
The Nouakchott power plant generates 120 megawatts and the extension project would increase this to 180 megawatts.
The meeting took place against the background of a controversy in the IDB financing of the extension project for an amount of 50 million euros.
On 16 January, an NGO, Sherpa, famous for tracking down of ill-gotten property in France by African heads of state, announced the deferment of the project’s financing, quoting an IDB’s correspondence of 10 January 2014.
However, any IDB official has denied the existence of the letter quoted by Sherpa.
