Hidden debts: Couriers handled cheques of company they knew nothing about – AIM report

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Hidden debts: Couriers handled cheques of company they knew nothing about – AIM report

10:00 CAT | 23 Sep 2021

Photo: Noticias

Two men who worked as couriers for the Maputo foreign exchange bureau Africambios on Thursday claimed they had no knowledge of the company MMocambique Construcoes, even though they both cashed cheques from this company for many millions of meticais.

Simione Mahumane and Naimo Quimbine were testifying before the Maputo City Court on the 19th day of the trial of 19 defendants charged with crimes arising from Mozambique’s largest financial scandal, known as the case of the hidden debts.

Both men are facing charges of abuse of trust, money laundering and membership of a criminal association. Although they were detained in January 2019, they both claimed not to understand the terms “money laundering” and “criminal association”, and asked judge Efigenio Baptista to explain these crimes.

As the evidence piles up, it is becoming clear that Africambios played a significant role in a large scale money laundering scheme that was based on bribes paid by the Abu Dhabi-based group, Privinvest.

Last week, businessman Fabiao Mabunda, the owner of MMocambique Construcoes, told the court a complex tale of transactions of any millions of dollars and meticais which his company had undertaken at the request of Angela Leao, the wife of Gregorio Leao, the former head of the Security and Intelligence Service (SISE).

The company, in 2013, received almost nine million US dollars from Privinvest. Because Privinvest supposedly wanted the money back, Mabunda took millions of meticais out of his bank account and changed it into dollars, doing much of this money changing at Africambios.

The complex scheme Mabunda outlined to the court was that he turned meticais received from Angela Leao into dollars, which he used to pay back Privinvest. The funds from Privinvest in the MMocambique account were used to pay other businesses and various expenses stipulated by Leao.

Mahumane said he knew nothing about MMocambique Construcoes and only knew Mabunda by sight as a client of Africambios.

But when prosecutor Sheila Marrengula showed him an MMozambique cheque for 872,500 meticais (about 13,630 US dollars, at current exchange rates), dated 3 August 2015, he admitted that he had cashed it at a local bank. An Africambios manager named Mohamed Tariq had told him to cash the cheque, and he had done so, delivering the cash to Tariq later that day.

Asked why Africambios did not simply deposit the cheque in its own bank account, he claimed that the bureau had stopped using its bank account in 2011 or 2012, because its owner, Momade Razak, had left the country. He is believed to be in Dubai, but Mahumane could not confirm that Razak sent funds from a foreign exchange bureau in Dubai to Africambios.

Naimo Quimbine also claimed he knew nothing about MMocambique Construcoes, but when confronted with no fewer than 11 MMocambique cheques, issued between 2013 and 2015, he confirmed that he had cashed them all. The total sum involved was 5.68 million meticais (about 88,750 dollars).

“All these cheques are from a company you say you don’t know”, remarked Marrengula.

“I received these cheques as part of my job. I cashed them and then gave the money to the person I got the cheques from”. In his case, that person was another of the accused, Africambios cashier Khessaujee Pulchand.

Asked about the statements he had made in the Attorney-General’s Office (PGR) during the preliminary investigations, Quimbine asked for them to be expunged from the record (which is not possible under Mozambican procedures).

“I was weeping in the PGR, I was very nervous and I can’t remember what I said”, he claimed. “I want to withdraw those statements and I prefer not to answer questions about them”.

But judge Baptista insisted on reading out his statements given at the PGR. At the time, he was not under arrest and had voluntarily obeyed the PGR summons. When Baptista took him through his statement paragraph by paragraph, he eventually agreed with most of it.

Quimbine said that Momade Razak had tried to prevent him from appearing before the PGR. A lawyer appointed by Africambios even submitted document claiming that Quimbine could not be interrogated because his sister had just died, and he had to go to her funeral in Inhambane.

“My sister hasn’t died. It was a lie”, said Quimbine. This attempt to silence him failed, and the record of that interview at the PGR shows Quimbine speaking about the same cheques from MMocambique Construcoes that Marrengula displayed.

But other parts of his statement were untrue, he insisted. In this 2019 interview with the PGR he said he had seen Mabunda with Pulchand – now he claimed this was false. “So you lied to the PGR that day”, remarked Baptista.

“I don’t remember. I was weeping”, insisted Quimbine.

The 2019 statement also said that, at the insistence of the Africambios management, he had opened accounts at four commercial banks. He did not say whether he had ever deposited any money in these accounts.

When he gave evidence on Tuesday, Pulchand said that he too had been obliged to open bank accounts which, although they were in his name, were in reality operated by the Africambios management. Hundreds of millions of meticais flowed in and out of these accounts, and Pulchand just signed cheques when Africambios told him to.

It is not yet clear whether Quimbine’s accounts were manipulated in the same way.

Both Mahumane and Quimbine could not prove that they had delivered large sums in cash to Africambios. No receipts were issued, and they were not asked to sign any document for the sums they handed over.

Source: AIM