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FILE - Former Minister of Economy and Finance Manuel Chang is being held at Modderbee prison in Benoni, east of Johannesburg, while the case remains in the courts.[File photo: Springs Advertiser]
Mozambique’s former finance minister, Manuel Chang, is expected to be extradited from South Africa to New York in July, according to a report carried by the Bloomberg financial agency.
Chang was detained at Johannesburg international airport on 29 December 2018, as he attempted to travel rom Maputo to Dubai. He was arrested on the basis of an international warrant issued by US prosecutors, who are charging him with conspiracy to commit money laundering, mail fraud and securities fraud.
The charges arise from the scandal of Mozambique’s “hidden debts” – a term that refers to illicit loans of over two billion US dollars obtained in 2013 and 2014 by three fraudulent, security-linked companies from the banks Credit Suisse and VTB of Russia.
The loans were only possible because Chang, finance minister at the time, signed loan guarantees for the whole amount. As expected, the three companies were unable to repay the loans, and the Mozambican state became liable. Thus, what were initially hidden loans became hidden debts.
The illicit scheme was cooked up by the Abu Dhabi based group, Privinvest, which became the sole contractor for the three companies, providing them with fishing boats, patrol vessels, radar stations and other assets at vastly inflated prices.
Privinvest secured its contracts by bribing Credit Suisse bankers and Mozambican officials, including Chang. Three of the Credit Suisse officials (Andrew Pearse, Detelina Subeva and Surjan Singh) have confessed to accepting Privinvest bribes.
For four years, the South African courts have dealt with competing extradition requests from the US and from Mozambique, who both wanted to put Chang on trial. In May, this part of the saga came to an end when the South African Constitutional Court, the highest court in the land, denied the Mozambican Attorney-General’s Office (PGR) leave to appeal against extradition of Chang to the US.
Assistant US Attorney Hiral Mehta said at a Monday hearing in Brooklyn federal court in New York that the extradition is likely to happen in July.
“He wants to get on a plane and he will likely be here in July, mid-July to late July”, Mehta told US District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis. “It will take time but he will be extradited”.
This clearly contradicts one of the key arguments by Chang’s legal team, who have claimed that the US prosecutors have lost interest in putting the former finance minister on trial.
Chang’s lawyer, Adam Ford, on Monday, said his client would seek to dismiss the case because the US had taken too long to bring him to trial.
Also facing a possible trial in New York is Najib Allam, the former chief financial officer of Privinvest. Allam is in Lebanon. While the US does not have an extradition treaty with Lebanon, Mehta said the US would seek Allam’s extradition if he is arrested.
Allam’s lawyer, Samidh Guha, is using the same argument as Ford. He wants the case dismissed on the grounds that the prosecution has taken too long to bring it to court.
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