Mozambique: GCRA recovered 1.6 billion meticais resulting from seizure of assets

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Mozambique: GCRA recovered 1.6 billion meticais resulting from seizure of assets

12:45 CAT | 26 Nov 2025

File photo: AIM

The Mozambican Attorney-General’s Office (PGR), through the Central Asset Recovery Office (GCRA), has recovered 1.6 billion meticais (25 million US dollars at the current exchange rate) resulting from the seizure of assets, financial assets and property.

According to Jorge Chivinge, deputy Attorney General, who was speaking on Tuesday, in Maputo, during the Seminar on Asset Management under the motto: “How Inter-Institutional Coordination Can Contribute to Increasing Effectiveness in Asset Recovery and Management”, the amount was recovered in national and foreign territory, since 2021.

Since the creation of the GCRA in 2019, the seized assets, including movable and immovable property, vehicles, money and other materials and financial assets, have reached a total amount of 8.7 billion meticais.

“From the seizure of assets since the creation of GCRA in 2019 until 2025, we had 932 vehicles, 203 properties, 7,638 movable assets, and other goods. These assets, added together, total 8.7 billion meticais”, he said.

According to Chivinge, asset recovery in Mozambique is a consequence of international recommendations reflected in the United Nations conventions against corruption, organized and transnational crime, the African Union Convention on the Prevention and Combating of Corruption, among other protocols.

These conventions, he said, recommend that States adopt measures in their domestic legislation to trace, freeze, and confiscate assets, instruments, products, and proceeds resulting from criminal activity.

“Nowadays, as is well known, it is clear that in addition to the application of classic penal measures—prison sentences, fines—the recovery of assets such as real estate, vehicles, money, and valuables acquired with the proceeds of crime is crucial to strengthening the State’s presence in the prevention and combating of crime, and also to show that crime does not pay,” he said.

He explained that asset recovery aims to deprive the perpetrator of the benefit they gained from criminal activity and restore them to the situation they were in before committing the crime, as well as deter the same criminal and others from committing new crimes.

“The mechanisms we know for asset recovery include the classic one, which consists of the forfeiture of instruments, products, and advantages that have a direct or indirect link, but which we can prove resulted from this crime,” he said.

Source: AIM