Mozambique: President stresses investment in quality to boost competitiveness
File photo: CM Jornal
The chairman of the Mozambican parliament’s Public Administration and Local Government Commission said that the decision to include the ‘hidden debts’ in the State General Account should be up to the institutions of justice, admitting the possibility of error in the legalisation of the financial burden.
“It is up to justice to declare legal or illegal the inscription of the [hidden] debts in the State General Account; that is what we have the Constitutional Council for,” Lucas Chomera told public radio station Radio Mozambique.
Lucas Chomera admitted that the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) in the Assembly of the Republic may have erred when it approved alone the inscription of the so-called hidden debts in the State General Account for 2017, and pointed out that the decision was based on available information at the time.
“We are human, we can also fail, but we decided based on the information that was available at the time,” he said.
Mozambican civil society organisations subsequently submitted a petition to the Constitutional Council requesting the debts, estimated at more than two billion euros, be declared unconstitutional, pointing out that they had been endorsed by the Mozambican government between 2012 and 2013 without the approval of the Assembly of the Republic.
Eight people were detained over the weekend in Maputo for alleged involvement in the hidden debts operation, which has already led to the arrest in South Africa of former finance minister Manuel Chang in the context of a request for extradition from the United States.
Three former Credit Suisse officials and a former employee of the shipyard where the vessels bought with some of the money from the debts originated are also targets of US extradition requests.
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