FDA fraud: Prosecution demands “exemplary sentences” – AIM report

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FDA fraud: Prosecution demands “exemplary sentences” – AIM report

5:30 CAT | 01 Dec 2017

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The Public Prosecutor has asked the Maputo city court to hand down “exemplary sentences” in the case of 24 people accused of defrauding the Mozambican government’s Agricultural Development Fund (FDA) of 170 million meticais (worth about 5.6 million US dollars at the time the crimes were committed).

Summing up the prosecution case on Thursday, Prosecutor Antonio Nhane said it had been shown that the former chairperson of the FDA, Setina Titosse, had approved projects to receive funding that did not exist. None of these fraudulent projects met any of the requirements demanded by the FDA, yet they had all been approved and had received FDA money.

The objective, Nhane accused, had never been to implement livestock projects, but merely to drain funds from the FDA.

The sentence, he urged, should not simply be to send Titosse and her accomplices to jail. The goods seized from the accused, believed to have been purchased with FDA money, “should revert in favour of the state”, he said.

“Society is thirsty for this justice”, said Nhane. “Society wants to see how this court will deal with white collar crime”. He pointed out that the accused were not poor. They were people enjoying “a stable life”, yet they had decided to defraud the state of millions of meticais.

Defence lawyers used the bureaucratic argument that there could be no crime because the Administrative Tribunal (the body that inspects the legality of public expenditure) had not yet issued its report on the accounts of the FDA. Thus the defence was using the habitual slowness of the Administrative Tribunal to shield the accused from the very serious financial crimes contained in the indictment.

Giving her final statement Titosse claimed that she was being “persecuted”. She said “in this country, when people work, it seems that others don’t like it”. She claimed there was no proof that money stolen from the FDA had ended up in her bank account, only “presumptions”.

She also claimed that Mozambican society was more interested in the case of the “hidden debts”, and suggested that it was here that the Public Prosecutor’s Office should concentrate its efforts. She was referring to the loans from European banks of over two billion US dollars to three security related companies, which had been illegally guaranteed by the previous government, headed by President Armando Guebuza.

Judge Alexandre Samuel announced that he will announce the court’s verdict on 20 December.

Source: AIM