Hidden debts: Renamo demands Nyusi’s presence in court – AIM report

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Hidden debts: Renamo demands Nyusi’s presence in court – AIM report

6:35 CAT | 21 Feb 2022

Image: Renamo Moçambique

Mozambique’s main opposition party, Renamo, on Monday demanded that President Filipe Nyusi should also testify in the trial underway of 19 people accused of financial crimes arising from the scandal of the “hidden debts”.

The trial has been under way since 23 August last year, and Renamo has largely ignored it. But on Monday Renamo leader Ossufo Momade addressed a press conference at the party’s headquarters in Maputo, and insisted that Nyusi must testify because on three occasions ether defence lawyers, or the Mozambique Bar Association (OAM), requested his presence in court which was rejected by the presiding judge, Efigenio Baptista.

“Constitutionally, all citizens are equal before the law, enjoy the same rights and subject to the same duties regardless of skin colour, race, gender, ethinic origin, place of birth, religion, social and marital status, academic background, political option,” Momade said – a statement as true as it is irrelevant.

The motivations behind the hidden debts, Momade stated, was supposed to be the defence of the country’s sovereignty, as the Mozambican state was facing such threats as illegal immigration, drug trafficking and piracy.

The opposition leader said that claims made in court by the former president, Armando Guebuza, the last witness to testify, last Friday are baseless. Guebuza said that he had concealed the “hidden debts” from the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, because there were Renamo members of parliament (MP), and Renamo still had an armed force fighting against the government.

“Was the integrated monitoring and protection system for Mozambique’s Exclusive Economic Zone to protect the country’s wealth or to fight Renamo?” Momade questioned, adding that Guebuza’s remarks are further evidence that the government has often seen political rivals as enemies.

It did not seem to occur to Momade that Guebuza was simply lying, and the reason his government hid the illicit loans from the Assembly had nothing to do with Renamo, but was that the loan guarantees signed by the then Finance Minister Manuel Chang were utterly illegal, and smashed through the ceiling on guarantees established in the 2013 and 2014 budget laws.

The concealment had nothing to do with Renamo – the loans and their guarantees were supposed to protect the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone in the Mozambique Channel, which could never have been threatened by Renamo, since it had no navy.

Momade also seemed unaware that his call for Nyusi to appear as a witness is exactly the same as the demand made by Guebuza, and his supporters within the ruling Frelimo Party.

He also completely ignored the arguments made by Baptista on Friday – which was that Mozambican law does not allow judges to change their minds. He had already ruled right at the start of the trial, in August, that it was unnecessary to call Nyusi as a witness.

“The OAM knows that when a decision has been taken, you can’t ask a judge to alter the decision”, he told OAM representative Flavio Menete. “This is just populism on your part. There’s no other word for it”.

Menete claimed that Guebuza’s testimony created a new context that would make it worth calling Nyusi to the witness stand. Baptista retorted “your request is exactly the same is the previous one, and you know the law forbids the judge from changing his decision”.

Furthermore, Nyusi has already testified at an earlier stage in the proceedings. What Momade, and many foreign observers, fail to grasp is that the trial is the culmination of a lengthy procedure. In the initial investigation, Nyusi was questioned at the Attorney-General’s Office (PGR), and on Friday Baptista read out his statements.

Nyusi said he was not involved in the creation of Ematum (Mozambique Tuna Company) and MAM (Mozambique Asset Management) – two of the three fraudulent companies at the heart of the scandal.

When he was Guebuza’s defence minister, he had no knowledge of the deal whereby the Abu Dhabi based group Privinvest became the sole contractor for the three companies. Furthermore, he had never participated in any way in arranging state guarantees for the two billion dollars’ worth of loans for the three companies from the banks Credit Suisse and VTB of Russia.

Nyusi said he had no idea how these guarantees, illegal under Mozambican law, had been issued by the then Finance Minister Manuel Chang.

Thus sharply contradicted the evidence given by Guebuza, which suggested that Nyusi, in his then role as Defence Minister and chairperson of the operational command, was responsible for the day to day functioning of the coastal protection project.

Source: AIM