Mozambique: Bid to ask S Africa to reconsider appeal against Chang extradition

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Mozambique: Bid to ask S Africa to reconsider appeal against Chang extradition

12:13 CAT | 21 Dec 2022

FILE - For illustration purposes only. [File photo: DW]

Lawyers for the Attorney General’s Office of Mozambique (PGR) have told Lusa that they intend to ask South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) to reconsider their request for an appeal against the extradition of Manuel Chang, a former Mozambique government minister, to the US in connection with the so-called ‘hidden debts’ scandal.

At issue is the request for an appeal that was rejected by the SCA “on the grounds that there is no reasonable prospect of success in an appeal and there is no other compelling reason why an appeal should be heard” as part of the hidden debts case in Mozambique, according to the court ruling that Lusa had sight of on Tuesday.

“We are awaiting instructions from the client [ Attorney General’s Office of Mozambique], but the way forward is to submit a request to the president of the Supreme Court of Appeal to reconsider this decision,” explained Busani Mabunda, one of the lawyers in South Africa. “If it does not meet with approval, we will take the case to the [South African] Constitutional Court.”

Mabuna stressed that in June, the Constitutional Court (ConCourt), South Africa’s highest, “said that it was not in the interest of justice for them to hear the case at that stage” and that this meant was that “what they were saying was exhaust all your appeals, or avenues, before coming back to us.”.

In that regard, Mabunda explained that the new bid will be submitted early next January to the Deputy President of the Supreme Court of Appeal of South Africa (SCA),judge Xola Mlungisi Petse , who is currently chairing that body on an interim basis.

READ: Breaking: Mozambique’s application for leave to appeal against Manuel Chang’s extradition to the US dismissed by Supreme Court of Appeal of South Africa

Mabunda also said that South Africa’s government had made a “commitment” to the SCA, during the recent judicial request process, to “not extradite” Chang, a former finance minister of Mozambique, whilst the legal process is underway in South Africa, to contest his extradition to the US, as ordered in November last year by the Gauteng provincial court.

According to the lawyer, in is comments to Lusa, South Africa’s Ministry of Justice “has given a commitment that it will not extradite Mr Chang to the US until all legal processes in the country have been exhausted.”

In the last four years, the former finance minister of Mozambique – who is seen as a central figure in the hidden debts scandal, because he was in office when the public enterprises contracted the massive loans, with secret state guarantees – has faced two competing extradition requests in South Africa, from the US and from Mozambique.

Chang, then 63, was arrested on 29 December 2018 at Johannesburg’s O. R. Tambo International Airport en route to Dubai, on the basis of an international arrest warrant issued by the US on 27 December for his alleged involvement in the hidden debts case.

The legal basis for his arrest was the extradition treaty between the US and South Africa, signed in September 1999 in Washington, according to the office of South Africa’s attorney general.

Chang was Mozambique’s finance minister during the presidential term of Armando Guebuza, between 2005 and 2010; in 2013 and 2014 he reportedly guaranteed debts totalling $2.7 billion (€2.5 billion) secretly contracted by Ematum, Proindicus and MAM – public companies referred to in the US indictment that were allegedly created for this purpose in the maritime security and fisheries sectors.

The loans, which were arranged by Credit Suisse and Russia’s VTB, werey underwritten by the government, without the knowledge of parliament and Mozambique’s Administrative Tribunal.

On 7 December of this year, in Maputo, 11 of the 19 defendants in the ‘hidden debts’ case were sentenced to between 10 and 12 years in prison, with three of them also ordered to pay damages to the state equivalent to €2.6 billion. The three are Ndambi Guebuza, son of the former president, and two former secret service officials, Gregório Leão and António Carlos do Rosário (respectively the former director-general of the country’s State Intelligence and Security Service -SISE and the former head of Economic Intelligence at SISE), who each received a 12-year prison sentence.

Source: Lusa