Mozambique: Three more convicted in hidden debts scandal released on parole

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Mozambique: Three more convicted in hidden debts scandal released on parole

3:25 CAT | 20 Jun 2025

File photo: O País

Three more people convicted in the hidden debt scandal, the biggest corruption case in Mozambique, have been released, including Gregório Leão, the former director-general of the Mozambican secret service, a lawyer involved in the case told Lusa on Friday.

The former director-general of the State Information and Security Service (SISE), Gregório Leão, was released on parole, along with António Carlos do Rosário, former director of Economic Intelligence at SISE and Bruno Langa, a personal friend and business partner of Ndambi Guebuza, son of former Mozambique President Armando Guebuza.

“Their preventive detention has been lifted under the parole regime,” Isálcio Mahanjane, lawyer for António Carlos do Rosário and Bruno Langa, who also represents Ndambi Guebuza, told Lusa.

The three convicted men, released on Thursday, were serving 12 year prison sentences after being arrested and placed in preventive detention in 2019.

The wife of the former director-general of the secret service, Ângela Leão, and Ndambi Guebuza were also released on Tuesday after being sentenced on December 7, 2022 to 11 and 12 years in prison, respectively.

In May this year, two other convicts were also granted parole, namely Cipriano Mutota, a former director of the SISE Studies Office, and Fabião Mabunda, a construction technician who owned a company that received bribes from Privinvest, according to the court.

At the time of the trial, Efigénio Baptista, the judge in the hidden debts case, the biggest corruption case in Mozambique’s history, sentenced six of the 19 official suspects to 12 years in prison, the highest sentence handed down on the last day of the reading of the sentence in Maputo.

Among other crimes, the court found it proven that they were bribed to facilitate meetings with the former Mozambican president and influence the approval of the coastal protection project used to raise the money that fuelled the hidden debts involving the Privinvest shipyards.

The court hearing the case also ruled that assets it considered to be “proceeds of crime” by the convicted defendants should be forfeited to the state.

The hidden debt scandal dates back to 2013 and 2014, when the then minister of finance, Manuel Chang, now detained in the United States, approved, without parliamentary approval, state guarantees on loans taken out by Proinducus, Ematum and MAM from Credit Suisse and VTB banks.

Discovered in 2016, the debts were estimated at around US$2.7 billion (more than €2.3 billion), according to figures presented by the Mozambican public prosecutor.

Mozambique was then one of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies for two decades, according to the World Bank, but ended up plunging into financial turmoil after the case, considered one of the country’s biggest financial scandals, which led to the blocking of foreign aid at the time.

Source: Lusa