Hidden debts: Chang nearer to extradition – AIM report

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Hidden debts: Chang nearer to extradition – AIM report

7:50 CAT | 28 Jul 2022

File photo: AFP

A South African judge on Wednesday threw out the application by the Mozambican Attorney-General’s Office (PGR) for leave to appeal to the Johannesburg High Court against the court’s decision that Mozambique’s former finance minister, Manuel Chang, should be extradited to the United States.

Chang has been in police custody in South Africa since December 2018, when he was detained at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg as he attempted to change planes on a holiday trip from Maputo to Dubai.

Chang was held on the basis of an international arrest warrant issued by American prosecutors, who want to put him on trial for conspiracy to commit money laundering, wire fraud and securities fraud.

The charges arise from Mozambique’s largest ever financial scandal, known as the case of the “hidden debts”. The term refers to the illicit loans of over two billion US dollars obtained by three fraudulent, security-linked companies, from the banks Credit Suisse and VTB of Russia. The loans became debts because of illicit government loan guarantees that Chang signed in 2013 and 2014. All three companies went bankrupt, and the creditors are demanding their money back.

The Americans claim jurisdiction because the fraudulent scheme abused the US financial system and American investors were among those swindled. But the Mozambican Attorney-General’s Office (PGR) wants Chang extradited to face justice in Mozambique.

A prominent coalition of Mozambican civil society organisations, the Budgetary Monitoring Forum (FMO), has been represented in the South African case, arguing strongly that Chang should be sent to the US, since they do not trust the Mozambican legal system.

For three and a half years the competing claims of Mozambique and the US have been discussed in South African courts. On two occasions South African justice ministers – first Michael Masutha, and then the current minister Ronald Lamola – ordered that Chang be returned to Maputo, and on both occasions they were overruled by judges.

The Johannesburg High Court paid attention to the FMO’s warning that the interests of justice would not be served by extraditing Chang to Mozambique.

Lamola’s decision was dated 23 August 2021, but Johannesburg judge Margaret Victor overturned it on 10 November. The PGR then sought leave to appeal directly to South Africa’s highest court, the Constitutional Court, but this court denied leave to appeal, declaring that it would not be in the interests of justice to hear the appeal “at this stage”.

The PGR’s latest application was to the High Court for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeal against the ruling that Chang should be surrendered to the US.

But Judge Victor has now rejected this application, saying the PGR had offered no compelling reasons why it should be granted leave to appeal and nor did its appeal have “a reasonable prospect of success”.

That would seem to make Chang’s extradition to the US a near certainty – but in this saga, new legal twists and turns can never be ruled out.

Source: AIM