‘The end of the ending’ reached in Chang’s extradition case – jurist

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

‘The end of the ending’ reached in Chang’s extradition case – jurist

5:50 CAT | 25 May 2023

File photo: DW

The Constitutional Court (ConCourt) of South Africa has dictated “the end of the ending of appeals” by Mozambique against the extradition of its former finance minister Manuel Chang to the United States of America, André Thomashausen told Lusa yesterday.

“It is the end of a very extensive judicial process that has dragged on for well over four years of appeals against the extradition of Manuel Chang,” advanced Thomashausen, a jurist and retired academic from the University of South Africa specialising in international and comparative law.

The South African Constitutional Court yesterday unanimously rejected an attempt by Maputo to prevent its former Mozambican finance minister Manuel Chang, detained in South Africa since 2018 at the request of the US, from being extradited to Mozambique to stand trial for fraud and corruption in the US$2.7 billion so-called ‘hidden debts’ process.

READ: Mozambique loses appeal to stop ex-minister’s extradition to US

In this scenario, the ten South African judges rejected for the second time in 12 months Maputo’s attempts to appeal a November 2021 decision by the Superior Court of Gauteng in Johannesburg, in which Judge Margaret Victor annulled the decision by the South African Minister of Justice, Ronald Lamola, to extradite Chang to Mozambique.

“Mr. Manuel Chang is to be surrendered and extradited to the United States of America to stand trial for his alleged offences, in the United States of America, as contained in the extradition request of January 28, 2019,” South African high court judge Margaret Victor ruled in the sentence to which Lusa had access.

The Constitutional Court of South Africa had already in June last year rejected a request from Maputo to appeal Chang’s extradition to the US.

“The PGR [Attorney General’s Office] of Mozambique is the party responsible for these delays, having used all imaginable resources,” Thomashausen told Lusa, stressing that “he presented this [new] petition to the Constitutional Court outside the period provided for by law, but the Constitutional Court forgave this lapse”.

“It did so to decide that no more appeal can be admitted because there is not even the slightest basis for such an appeal to succeed,” he explained.

More than US$3 million in costs

In Thomashausen’s view, “this ended the costly abuses of the judicial process that the PGR of Mozambique has insisted on and which have already cost Mozambican taxpayers more than three million dollars in lawyers’ expenses”.

“For Manuel Chang, the decision comes in time to escape another winter in the South African prison system. South Africa has daily power cuts of 10 out of 24 hours and therefore prisons during this winter will work without any means of heating,” Thomashausen concluded.

The South African Ministry of Justice and Correctional Services, contacted by Lusa, has not yet reacted to the court’s decision.

At the age of 63 (he is now 67), Manuel Chang was arrested on December 29, 2018, at O.R. Tambo airport in Johannesburg on his way to Dubai, on the basis of an international arrest warrant issued by the US on December 27, for his alleged involvement in the so-called hidden debts process.

The loans were endorsed by the government led by then-president Armando Guebuza without the knowledge of parliament and the Administrative Court.

Chang, who was Mozambique’s finance minister between 2005 and 2010, will have signed the guarantees for the loans contracted in favour of Ematum, Proindicus and MAM, public companies mentioned in the US indictment, allegedly created for the maritime security and fisheries sectors between 2013 and 2014.

Loan mobilisation was organised by banks Credit Suisse and VIB of Russia.

Source: Lusa