NPR.

This is the indicator from planet money.

I'm Waylon Wong.

And I'm Darien Woods.

Back in 2013, the government of Mozambique said it was going fishing for tuna.

Mozambique is in Southeast Africa and borders the Indian Ocean, which has a lot of tuna.

The Mozambique government set up a new fishing company. This company borrowed $850 million from

international investors, and it spent some of that money on a fleet of 24 new fishing boats.

But those boats never really got used.

It turns out that the government wasn't all that interested in building up its tuna fishing industry.

What some state officials were actually interested in was taking out loans and not telling

anyone about it.

Yeah, around the same time, the government secretly borrowed over a billion dollars

through the same investment banks. When this debt was uncovered a few years later, it caused a

huge scandal involving bribery and kickbacks, and the economy tipped into crisis.

It's a financial scandal that crashed Mozambique's economy.

Here's news outlet Al Jazeera, reporting on the fallout in 2022.

It's become known as the hidden debt scandal.

That is one of the biggest corruption cases on the African continent this century.

It was also known as the tuna bond scandal.

And it's a high-profile example of a government surreptitiously borrowing money.

But new research shows that hidden debt is a widespread problem.

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