FADM General Staff unaware of theft in Army Command

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FADM General Staff unaware of theft in Army Command

11:37 CAT | 14 Jun 2017

Miramar

Officers from the General Staff of the Mozambican Armed Forces (FADM) claimed on Monday that neither they, nor the auditors, detected the fraud whereby 36 million meticais (worth about 1.2 million US dollars at the time) was siphoned out of the accounts of the Army Command between 2010 and 2015.

Four officers and five civilians are on trial before the Maputo City Court. The prosecution claims that the soldiers, who worked in the finance department of the Army Command, faked wage payments and drained the money into bank accounts held by people outside the army, mostly relatives and lovers.

On Monday, the director of the personnel department of the FADM General staff, Lt. Freitas Norte, claimed that it had been impossible to detect the theft, since the requests for money did not pass through the General Staff.

He said the General Staff updates military wages sheets, at the request of each branch (army, navy, air force and logistics). It was within each branch that the wages sheets are drawn up.

The administrative procedures for paying wages and allowances took place within each branch of the FADM, he said, “and within this process, anomalies could occur”.

The director of finance in the General Staff, Armindo Nhabinde, said it would have been difficult to organize the theft without the intervention of the then head of the payments sector in the Army Command, Maj. Alfredo Issufo Martinho. It was his task to check the regularity of requests for payments.

This is in line with the testimony given last week by the two main accused, Ernesto Rufino and Abdul Ismael. They admitted they diverted the money, but claimed they were ordered to do so by Issufo, who instructed them to deposit sums in accordance with payment requisitions that he provided.

According to Rufino and Ismael, Issufo doctored the paperwork, inflating the sums to be paid. They said he demanded 60 per cent of the stolen money for himself, and they could divide the remaining 40 per cent between them.

It is impossible to check this story with Issufo, since he died in 2014. But Rufino admitted that the theft continued, even after Issufo’s death.

Nhabinde told the court that, after taking office as finance director, in 2013, he had no suspicion that there was anything wrong in the payments made in the Army Command. He added that the General Inspectorate of Finance held audits of the Army Command in 2014 and 2015, and did not detect any sign of the theft.

Once the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption (GCCC) discovered that tens of millions of meticais had gone missing, no further audit was undertaken on the grounds that the case was now before the courts.