FDA fraud: A tale of lots of money and no cattle – AIM

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FDA fraud: A tale of lots of money and no cattle – AIM

8:21 CAT | 19 Sep 2017

Miramar

More of the 24 accused in the gigantic fraud that syphoned 170 million meticais (worth about 5.6 million US dollars at the time) from the Mozambican government’s Agricultural Development Fund (FDA) between 2012 and 2015 on Monday tried to thrust the entire blame onto the shoulders of the former chairperson of the Fund, Setina Titosse.

Thus Vicente Matine told the Maputo City Court that he had met a domestic servant of Titosse named Leopoldina Bambo at a party. She told him that the FDA was financing projects. So he submitted a project, and received 4.7 million meticais in his bank account.

He persuaded his wife, Atalia Machava, to do the same, and she received 5.2 million meticais. Two acquaintances of Matine, Felisberto Zacarias and Lazaro Mondlana, received 5.1 and just over five million meticais respectively. Mondlana’s nephew, Adriano Mavie, also applied to the FDA, and received 5.1 million meticais.

None of these projects was real. None of these five applicants had any land on which to implement livestock projects and none of them purchased any cattle. Instead, they transferred the money to other accounts. The account numbers were supplied by Leopoldina Bambo, via Matine.

Asked by judge Alexandre Samuel whether he had indeed received 5.1 million meticais, Mavie replied “Yes. I wanted to raise livestock. From this amount I made bank transfers to Leopoldina Bambo and Vicente Matine. All on the instructions of Vicente. I received the money, but I didn’t know how to start the project. I left it all in Vicente’s hands”.

Matine said his wife transferred 4.4 million meticais to the account of Milda Cossa, the personal assistant to Setina Titosse. He said this was “to make flexible” the purchase of space and livestock for her project”. He claimed she had returned the other 800,000 meticais to the FDA.

But Atalia Machava herself gave a rather different version, saying that she had abandoned the livestock project for reasons of health and had left some of the money with Matine.

Matine also said that he channelled much of the money these five defendants received to Titosse. On at least four occasions he delivered sums of money to Titosse at her house. On other occasions he sent the money via her driver and co-defendant, Jorge Tembe.

“Apart from bank transfers to her assistant, Milda Cossa, I handed over sums in cash, varying between 240,000 and 500,000 meticais”, he said. “I did this because she said that, since she was an experienced person, she would take responsibility for raising cattle in our names”.

He claimed that he and his relatives and friends never distrusted Titosse. “Thus, on her instructions, almost all the money we received ended up in her hands”, he said.

Bambo told the court she had made her bank account available to Titosse to receive money that would supposedly be used to purchase cattle. Money poured into her account, and she claimed that sometimes she did not know who had sent it. She just transferred it on to the accounts of Titosse and Cossa.

Bambo claimed she had never derived any benefit from these transactions, because all the money went to Titosse.

None of these accused purchased as much as a single cow with the millions and millions of meticais they had received from the FDA.

Their defence effectively rests on claims that they have no idea how banks work, and believe that it is perfectly normal for large amounts of money to enter an account without the account holder having the faintest idea where it came from.

Source: AIM