Hidden debts: Judge rejects attempt to call Nyusi as witness – AIM report

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Hidden debts: Judge rejects attempt to call Nyusi as witness – AIM report

9:17 CAT | 23 Aug 2021

FILE - The request came from Alexandre Chivale, the lawyer for Antonio do Rosario (pictured], the former head of economic intelligence of the State Security and Intelligence Service (SISE). [File photo: DW]

The Maputo City Court has rejected a call from defence lawyers for President Filipe Nyusi and 34 others to be added to the list of witnesses in the forthcoming trial of 19 people in the case of the “hidden debts”, Mozambique’s largest ever financial scandal.

The request came from Alexandre Chivale, the lawyer for Antonio do Rosario, the former head of economic intelligence of the State Security and Intelligence Service (SISE).

SISE was at the heart of the scheme to set up the three fraudulent companies, Ematum, Proindicus and MAM, which, in 2013 and 2014, obtained loans of over two billion US dollars from the banks Credit Suisse and VTB of Russia. The loans were only possible because of guarantees issued illegally by the government of the time under the then president Armando Guebuza. The loans and their guarantees violated the 2013 and 2014 budget laws, and the Mozambican Constitution.

In a dispatch dated 17 August, the judge in the case, Efigenio Baptista, noted that Nyusi has already given evidence, which is now part of the case file. But Chivale wanted this evidence scrapped. According to Baptista, he and a second lawyer, Isalcio Mahanjane, had argued that Nyusi’s statements were null and void, and should be removed from the case file.

At a later stage in the pre-trial investigations, the two lawyers demanded that Nyusi be questioned, even though they had earlier asked for his evidence to be deleted. Baptista found this behavior “paradoxical”.

Shortly afterwards, Chivale dropped his request for the court to question Nyusi. Now he has changed his mind again, with the demand that Nyusi be heard as a witness.

This angered Baptista who said the two lawyers had made a “manifestly reprehensible” use of legal procedures “in order to attain an illegal goal, namely to hinder the discovery of the truth, to dull the action of justice, or to drag out the case, without any serious basis”.

They had behaved in a “dishonest” way, the judge accused, “with the intention of damaging the conditions favourable to a good and just decision in the case”.

Furthermore, Nyusi could not be a witness because he was not “a disinterested person”, and that same objection held for some of the other people on Chivale’s list, notable Jean Boustani, an official of the Abu Dhabi based group Privinvest, deeply involved in setting up the corrupt scheme.

In any case, Boustani is not in Mozambique, as Chivale must have known, and the likelihood of him responding to a summons from a Maputo court is minimal.

Chivale also wanted to call Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosario, Justice Minister Helena Kida. Defence Minister Jaime Neto, Agriculture Minister Celso Correia, the Mayor of Maputo, Eneas Comiche, the head of the parliamentary group of the ruling Frelimo Party, Sergio Pantie, and many others.

Baptista noted that this was just a list, and Chivale “does not allege or show the contribution they could make to the discovery of the material truth”

It was up to Chivale to show that the people he wanted to call as witnesses had some direct knowledge of the facts. It was not up to the court to fill in the holes in the lawyers’ request, and so he was rejecting it.

Baptista also rejected requests for the provisional release of Antonio do Rosario and Ndambi Guebuza, so that they could attend the trial in freedom.

Rosario was claiming the right to be tried in freedom solely because of his status as a SISE official. Chivale has made this argument at least three times before on behalf of his client, and it has always been rejected. Baptista thought he should not get away again with a “manifestly baseless” claim and so fined him five times the monthly minimum wage (equivalent to about 350 US dollars).

Source: AIM