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The Maputo City Court on Monday was faced with two contradictory documents claiming to be the same thing – the founding contract of the real estate company Txopela Investments.
On the 56th day of the trial of 19 people facing charges related to the scandal of Mozambique’s “hidden debts”, Txopela came under the spotlight.
The prosecution believes that Txopela is part of a web of companies used for money laundering purposes by the Abu Dhabi based group, Privinvest, and its Mozambican accomplices in the security and intelligence service (SISE).
Txopela’s security links are beyond doubt. Back in September, the former General Director of SISE, Gregorio Leao, told the court that Txopela was “an operational vehicle” for SISE, and the former head of SISE Economic Intelligence, Antonio Carlos do Rosario, boasted that he had ordered the creation of the company, supposedly to attract foreign investment.
Rosario in fact owned Txopela, although attempts were made to conceal this fact. Hence the two contradictory founding documents. This came to light when lawyer Abdul Gani, who had represented Rosario at earlier stages of the proceedings, tried to withdraw Txopela-related documents which he had delivered to the court.
These included a supposed account of the foundation of Txopela which alleged that most of the shares were held by the Lebanese company IRS. But the alternative document, submitted to the court records by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, showed that Rosario owned 98 per cent of the shares.
Gani presumably concluded that he had been deceived by his former client, since there seems no other reasonable explanation for why he would try to withdraw a document which he had submitted.
The Txopela documents Gani submitted have already been used in the failed appeals launched by Rosario and others to the Appeals Court and the Supreme Court against their continued preventive detention. So simply removing them from the record seems out of the question. Judge Efigenio Baptista reserved judgement on the issue, and asked Gani to provide legal grounds for his request.
But the judge did declare “one of these two documents must be false. They give two different versions of the same meeting”.
He hoped to find out who was responsible, since “falsification of documents is a crime”.
Two witnesses made it very clear that the document submitted by Gani is the fake. That document claimed that IRS was represented at the meeting by accountant Bilal Sidat, the financial administrator of Txopela. But Sidat told the court he had not been present at any such meeting, and that his signature had been forged.
Indeed, when Txopela was set up, in September 2013, Sidat did not even know it existed. Rosario only invited him to join the company in January 2014.
This version was supported by lawyer Inram Issa, whom Rosario had brought into Txopela to deal with legal issues. He insisted that the original shareholding structure of Txopela was 98 per cent for Rosario and one per cent each for Naseem Abdullah and Tayob dos Santos (both believed to be SISE collaborators). Later Rosario obtained the outstanding two per cent to become the sole owner of Txopela.
He also demanded that Issa turn over all the original Txopela documents because they were “confidential”. Issa had dealt with all the legal paperwork of the company registration, the publication of its statutes in the official gazette, the share certificates and the like, and now he had to turn it all over to Rosario.
Both witnesses agreed that Txopela had received 43 million meticais (672,000 US dollars, at current exchange rates) from the Ministry of Finance, but did not know what this money was for. The company also received 10 million euros supposedly from IRS, and intended to purchase shares in Txopela.
But, despite an agreement between Txopela and IRS, under which the share capital of Txopela should have risen from 10 million to 430 million meticais, by 2019, when both Sidat and Issa ended their ties with Txopela, IRS was not listed as a shareholder.
Issa told the court that, although IRS is registered in Lebanon, it was actually set up by Rosario. The company’s Lebanese lawyer, Maroun Haddad, holds 98 per cent of the shares, but Rosario told Issa he intended to take full control of IRS “as an offshore entity”. No doubt Rosario’s arrest in 2019 put the brakes on this plan.
To Issa’s astonishment, IRS has tried to sue him, for allegedly stealing money from IRS. He had to hire a lawyer in Beirut to find out what was happening. He learnt that IRS is also suing Bilal, Abdullah, dos Santos, and Txopela itself (but not Rosario).
Using a friendly contact in the Lebanese consulate in Maputo, Issa found that Privinvest is behind the IRS lawsuit, and relatives of the Privinvest founder, Iskandar Safa, are involved.
Issa informed Rosario of this, and sent messages to him in his prison cell. He was shocked when Rosario’s final taped message contained insults and threats such as “you son of a whore”, “you dirty dog”, and “now you’ll know blood’.
After receiving this message, Issa cut off all his ties with Rosario.
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