Buchili: Prosecutors must ensure integrity of contracts

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Buchili: Prosecutors must ensure integrity of contracts

10:04 CAT | 13 May 2020

Photo: Miramar

Mozambican Attorney General Beatriz Buchili on Tuesday swore into office 35 prosecutors, who will specialise in administrative law and particularly the inspection of public contracts.

Speaking at the ceremony, Buchili said “public contracting has often been stained by acts of corruption. We are counting on the valuable contribution of those who have taken office today in preventing and fighting against this great evil, through inspecting public contracts, and supporting public managers so that they do not fall into crimes connected with the mismanagement of public funds”.

“It is your mission”, she told the new prosecutors, “to ensure the integrity of public contracting”.

These prosecutors must also check the declaration of assets that all senior state officials are supposed to make when they take office and once a year thereafter. This is a provision of the Law on Public Probity, and is supposed to be a check against illicit enrichment.

“It is fundamental”, said Buchili, “that the scarce resources of our state should be properly managed and allocated in the public interest – hence the need to ensure that the managers of public assets exercise their duties in observance of public morality”.

Currently 14 prosecutors have been allocated to the commissions that receive the declarations of assets. This is not enough, since there is an average of 18,000 such declarations a year. So 16 of the new prosecutors will be allocated to this task full time.

Buchili thought this increase of staffing goes alongside a recent government decree declaring that those officials who do not deliver their declarations of assets on time will have their salaries suspended and will be fined. She thought that, taken together, these measures “will stimulate the effective implementation of the law on public probity”.

Only by ensuring that the declaration of assets are indeed delivered, and by checking them “can we attain the objectives for which the law was passed, namely to ensure public morality, transparency, impartiality and probity”.

The task of assessing the declarations of assets “is extremely sensitive”, said Buchili. “It requires from you a great sense of responsibility and confidentiality, since the declarations are also important instruments in supporting the investigation of economic and financial crimes, including corruption”.

Source: AIM