Mozambique: Former spy chief to lodge appeal against 12-year jail term – lawyer

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Mozambique: Former spy chief to lodge appeal against 12-year jail term – lawyer

4:45 CAT | 08 Dec 2022

FILE - Abdul Gani, [File photo: Domingo]

The lawyer for Gregório Leão, the former director-general of Mozambique’s State Information and Security Service (SISE), said on Wednesday that he would lodge an appeal against the 12-year sentence handed down to his client in the ‘hidden debts’ corruption case.

According to the lawyer, Abdul Gani, in comments to journalists after the reading of the sentence, the case “is not over” because “of the facts that the court has proven, there is not a single fact that can prove that my constituent received money” from bribes relating to the huge hidden debts contracted by public enterprises with secret state guarantees.

Gani said that Leão would appeal to the High Court of Appeal and if he fails there, he will proceed to the Supreme Court.

“We have a lot of … material for the appeal and we will argue the matter in two instances,” he said.

For his part, Mpasso Camblege, lawyer for another defendant, Cipriano Mutota, a former director of the SISE Studies Office, also expressed dissatisfaction with his constituent’s 10-year prison sentence, saying that he may lodge an appeal.

“We expected something different, given what is on the record,” Camlege said.

The lawyer pointed out that the fact that Mutota was acquitted of the crime of embezzlement removed the basis of the argument that he had commiteed the crimes of criminal association and money laundering for which he was eventually sentenced to 10 years (the lowest sentence handed down in case).

Helder Matlaba, lawyer for Cremildo Manjate, one of the eight defendants who were acquitted in the case, lamented the “anguish” experienced by his client for the two years he spent on remand, stressing the possibility that he might seek compensation from the state.

“I commend the courage that [the judge] had to distance himself from some aspects of what was defended by the prosecution, managing to take an independent position,” Matlaba said.

Duarte Casimiro, the president of the Mozambican Bar Association (OAM), which acted as an assistant to the prosecution, praised the “effort made by the judge” in seeing justice done, and said that the disagreements over the sentence were normal.

“It was a very great effort that we even applauded, because he always tried to justify” his positions, Casimiro stressed.

He said it was normal for defendants’ lawyers to lodge appeals, because “a sentence pleases some and displeases others.”

The judge in what is the biggest corruption case in the history of Mozambique, sentenced six of the 19 defendants to 12 years in prison, the highest sentence handed down on Wednesday, the seventh and final day of reading of the verdict in Maputo.

Four other defendants were sentenced to 11 years in prison and one was given 10 years, the lowest sentence.

The judge also sentenced the defendants Ndambi Guebuza, Gregório Leão and António Carlos do Rosário to pay a further $2.8 billion (€2.6 billion) in damages.

The amount demanded from those three defendants is equivalent to the $2.7 billion plus interest that the court assumed corresponded to the bribes that the defendants received and to the material damages suffered by the Mozambican state, with the contracting of the hidden debts – contracted with the banks Credit Suisse and the Russian VTB with sovereign guarantees for around that amount.

Source: Lusa