Hidden debts: Testimony of contractors is crucial, says judge – AIM report

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Hidden debts: Testimony of contractors is crucial, says judge – AIM report

7:18 CAT | 26 Jan 2022

Photo: O País

Judge Efigenio Baptista, of the Maputo City Court, on Tuesday strongly defended the decision to call a string of witnesses to testify to the property dealings of Angela Leao, in the current trial of 19 people accused of financial crimes in the case of Mozambique’s “hidden debts”.

Angela Leao is the wife of Gregorio Leao, the former general director of the Security and Intelligence Service (SISE). She owns a string of properties which the prosecution argues were purchased with money from the Abu Dhabi based group, Privinvest, accused of paying bribes, of at least 9.5 million dollars, to the Leao couple.

Much of this money did not go directly to Angela Leao but via the account of businessman Fabiao Mabunda, whose company MMocambique Construcoes undertook much of the work on her properties.

The court has called as witnesses several contractors who undertook work for Leao or Mabunda, and on Mozambican social media Baptista has come under criticism from some who regard this testimony as irrelevant.

At the start of Tuesday’s court session, Baptista hit back. The prosecution, he said, argued that Angela Leao’s houses and other real estates were paid for with money from the “hidden debts”, “but this assertion must be proved at this trial”.

The defence, on the other hand, might argue that the properties existed before the debts were contracted.

To prove who is right, the contractors hired by Leao had to be questioned, said Baptista. “This is not a waste of time, as some people are saying”, he stressed. “It is important to find out when work on the properties was done, and how it was paid for”.

The State could not seize properties, such as Leao’s houses, “unless it can prove that they are the products of crime. An authoritarian state would simply expropriate them, but here the State has to prove that the assets were acquired with money from the debts”.

That was why the court had taken evidence from the owners of the architectural concern Architech, and from the building company Mozago, looking into when they were hired, and how much they were paid.

“Those who think we are wasting our time, either do not understand the law, or have an agenda opposed to that of the court”, said Baptista. The questioning of witnesses over the past week “was very important – it sought to prove that all these assets really were acquired with money from the debts. Those days were not wasted”.

The first witness who testified on Tuesday was Elcy Venichand, a tenant in one of Angela Leao’s Maputo houses, who had a rent contract from January 2018 to April 2020. The house is in the up-market neighbourhood of Triunfo, near the Costa do Sol beach, and cost Venichand 160,000 meticais (2,500 US dollars, at the current exchange rate) a month.

She acquired the rent contract via a middleman named Flavio Silvestre, but discovered that the true owner of the house was Angela Leao.

Venichand said that people who identified themselves as agents of SISE once came to the house to collect a locker which contained firearms. They looked through the house but Venichand’s husband told the SISE agents that the locker had already been removed.

A second witness, Gloria Simione, said that her company, Mercury Comercial, was contacted in 2014 by Italmar Pereira, one of the owners of Arquitech. Pereira wanted to buy assorted building materials, including tiles and sanitary ware. From Pereira’s testimony last week, it is clear that this material was for work on a property owned by Angela Leao in Matola-Rio, on the outskirts of Maputo.

Mercury did not have all the material in stock, and so imported it from Portugal. Arquitech ordered the goods, but insisted that Mercury send the invoice to MMocambique Construcoes. 50,000 dollars was paid in advance, and the total bill came to about 4.4 million meticais.

It was MMozambique Construcoes that paid all the invoices submitted by Mercury, and collected the building materials in instalments.

“The basic question”, Baptista remarked, “is: were the buildings paid for with money from the debts? If they were, then they are the product of crime, and must revert to the state”.

Source: AIM