Mozambique: Court rejects defence request for 35 witnesses including president in ‘hidden debts’ case

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Mozambique: Court rejects defence request for 35 witnesses including president in ‘hidden debts’ case

7:35 CAT | 23 Aug 2021

File photo: DW

The Maputo City Judicial Court has rejected the request for a list of 35 witnesses, including the Mozambican President, submitted by defence lawyers in the ‘hidden debts’ case, for “not respecting legal precepts,” it was announced on Friday.

“[The lawyers in the case] have made a manifestly reproachable use of the process or procedural means, with the aim of achieving an illegal objective, preventing the discovery of the truth, hindering the action of justice or delaying, without serious grounds, the process,” it said in an August 16 order, quoted today by daily Notícias.

The order, signed by the judge of the cause, Efigénio Baptista, was submitted by two defence lawyers and which, according to the document, reveal a “dishonest activity, with the intention of harming the conditions favourable to a good and just decision of the plea”.

The trial in the case of the so-called ‘hidden debts’, the biggest corruption case in Mozambique’s history, begins on Monday and will see 19 defendants in the dock, with 70 witnesses and 69 declarants.

Among the witnesses listed in the application by the lawyers, which have since been rejected, are the Mozambican President, Filipe Nyusi, the Prime Minister, Carlos Agostinho do Rosário, the Mozambican Justice Minister, Helena Kida, and Agriculture Minister, Celso Correia.

According to the order, the applicant neither alleges nor demonstrates the contribution of the witnesses he has put forward for the “search for the material truth of the case,” considering also that some of the witnesses are interested parties in the process and therefore cannot present themselves in court in that role.

“It was up to the plaintiff to allege and prove that those individuals have direct knowledge of facts that are the subject matter of the case. It is not the court’s role to guess the meaning that the parties want to give to their generic statements, nor to make up for their deficiencies,” the document adds.

Among the 19 defendants in the case are Armando Ndambi Guebuza, eldest son of former President Armando Guebuza, the former private secretary of the former President Inês Moiane and his former political adviser Renato Matusse.

Also accused are the former director-general of the State Information and Security Service (SISE), Gregório Leão, and the former director of economic intelligence of the institution António Carlos do Rosário.

Twelve of the 19 defendants are on provisional release, while seven are awaiting trial in custody.

The ‘hidden debts’ are related to loans worth US$2.2 billion (about two billion euros), contracted between 2013 and 2014 from the British subsidiaries of investment banks Credit Suisse and VTB by Mozambican state companies Proindicus, Ematum and MAM.

The loans were secretly endorsed by the Frelimo government, led by Armando Guebuza, without the knowledge of parliament and the Administrative Court.

As well as the main case, the Mozambican justice system has opened a separate case in which several other people are suspected of participating in the scheme, including former Finance Minister Manuel Chang, former directors of the Bank of Mozambique, and former executives of Credit Suisse, the bank that made the loans possible.

Source: Lusa