Mozambique: Deportation of Manuel Chang to US delayed by appeal by Maputo

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Mozambique: Deportation of Manuel Chang to US delayed by appeal by Maputo

8:31 CAT | 29 Nov 2022

File photo: AFP

The extradition of Mozambique’s former Finance Minister Manuel Chang to the United States, who has been jailed for four years in South Africa, is “unenforceable” while an appeal by the Mozambican government is pending in the South African courts, legal sources said today.

Chang is the subject of two competing extradition requests from the United States and Mozambique and has been detained in South Africa since December 2018 under a US arrest warrant.

“We are waiting for the response from the SCA [Supreme Court of Appeal], and it is impossible to predict the [court’s] calendar,” a legal source in the extradition lawsuit for the former Mozambican ruler underway in South Africa told Lusa.

The previous court ruling, in the Gauteng High Court on 10 November 2021, decided that the former Mozambican ruler should be extradited to the US.

The following day, the Mozambican government requested permission from South Africa’s SCA in Bloemfontein to appeal the Gauteng High Court’s decision and simultaneously submitted a request for direct access to the Constitutional Court in Pretoria, which it believed was “in a better position to review the decision” of the Gauteng regional court.

However, in June this year, South Africa’s Constitutional Court rejected the request from the Mozambican Attorney General’s Office to appeal against the extradition of the former Mozambican finance minister to the US.

“It is a typical case of an arm wrestling match in which there is no compromise, and the Mozambique Prosecutor’s Office, led by Mrs Beatriz Buchili and very closely linked to President Nyusi, simply does everything in its power to delay and prevent the extradition to the United States, although the South African judicial authorities have decided twice that this is the only legal and constitutionally permitted decision and all appeals against these decisions were rejected, recently even the special appeal to the Constitutional Court of South Africa,” said the academic and jurist Andre Thomashausen, a specialist in international and comparative law.

The decision of the Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg invalidated the announcement in August last year by the South African justice minister, Ronald Lamola, that Mozambique should be the place of Manuel Chang’s trial.

In the view of Judge Margarete Victor, “corruption contributes to poor countries becoming even poorer,” stressing that the South African justice minister should have justified all the reasons for the decision to deport Manuel Chang to Mozambique.

“There are material considerations that call into question, for example, the arrest warrant,” the judge stressed, referring to a second arrest warrant issued on 14 February 2020 by the Mozambique authorities against Manuel Chang, which she considered “difficult to understand”.

“It seems that there is a crime of passive corruption for a certain act, and it is not clear whether there will be punishment of Mr Chang in this regard,” the South African judge stressed.

Following the ruling, the US government also reiterated its commitment to bringing those responsible for “large-scale fraud, bribery and money laundering” to justice as the South African judiciary decided.

In the last four years, the handover of Mozambique’s former finance minister, considered the “key” in the alleged Mozambican hidden debts scam, was scheduled for the third time after two attempts by Pretoria, invalidated in May 2019 and August 2021, by Maputo.

The former Mozambican minister, detained in South Africa since December 2018 at the request of the US, is allegedly involved in the case of hidden debts worth more than $2.2 billion (about €2 billion), contracted between 2013 and 2014 from the British subsidiaries of investment banks Credit Suisse and VTB by Mozambican state-owned companies Proindicus, Ematum and MAM.

The loans were secretly endorsed by the Frelimo government, led by President Armando Guebuza, Filipe Nyusi’s predecessor, without the knowledge of parliament or the Administrative Court.

“And that is where the big problem lies. In my view, President Nyusi and his administration want to continue to hide until the last consequence. It is not convenient that Mr Chang, in an American court where he may feel safe, comes to explain who ordered him to sign and do what he did because it is inconceivable that he has carried out these acts of corruption and laundering, money laundering, on his own initiative,” Thomashausen stressed.

“It is unusual for an arrest just to secure extradition to extend beyond a year. Here we are talking about four years in which this person is detained without a trial, a formal charge, or the possibility of defence. It is a violation of fundamental human rights,” the South African lawyer told Lusa.

READ: Mozambique: Chang indicted in case on Odebrecht contracts in Beira, Nacala

South Africa’s delay in Chang extradition case due to Mozambique’s “insistence” – Thomashausen

Source: Lusa