Mozambique: Government will respect conviction of former finance minister

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Mozambique: Government will respect conviction of former finance minister

5:33 CAT | 14 Aug 2024

Image: Ministério da Justiça, Assuntos Constitucionais e Religiosos

Mozambique’s justice minister, Helena Kida, said on Wednesday that the country would respect last week’s conviction of former Mozambican finance minister Manuel Chang by the US courts in the case of hidden debts.

“I always respect the jurisdiction of others and so we have to respect it. If procedural mechanisms are to be taken, it has to happen there (…) I think it’s a decision taken, and we will respect it,” Helena Kida limited herself to saying when questioned by the media about the case on the sidelines of a coordinating council of the Ministry of Justice, Constitutional and Religious Affairs, which is taking place in Maputo province.

Manuel Chang, Mozambique’s former finance minister, was sentenced on Thursday in the United States in connection with the hidden debts case. His sentence is yet to be announced.

Chang was charged with accepting bribes and conspiracy to embezzle funds from Mozambique’s efforts to protect and expand its natural gas and fishing industries in a plan to enrich himself and cheat investors. Prosecutors accused Chang of collecting $7 million in bribes, transferred via US banks to an associate’s European accounts.

The former minister was arrested on 29 December 2018 at O. R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, South Africa, while en route to Dubai, based on an international arrest warrant issued by the United States on 27 December, for his involvement in the so-called hidden debts case.

Mozambiqye’s Attorney General’s Office (PGR) asked South Africa at the time to extradite the former ruler to Mozambique. Still, Mozambican civil society kept extradition to the US on the table through various legal challenges submitted to the South African courts until the former minister was extradited to US territory in mid-2023.

Chang, whose defence promises to appeal, rejects all the accusations and points to Mozambique’s current president, Filipe Nyusi, who was defence minister at the time, as the one who ordered him to sign the bank guarantees that made the hidden debts possible.

At the end of July, the deputy minister of economy and finance, Amílcar Tivane, said that Manuel Chang returned to the Mozambican Attorney General’s Office at least $7 million (€6.4 million).

The hidden debts scandal dates back to 2013 and 2014 when the then finance minister approved state guarantees on loans from Proinducus, Ematum and MAM to the bank’s Credit Suisse and VTB in absentia of parliament.

Discovered in 2016, the debts were estimated at around $2.7 billion (around €2.55 billion), according to figures presented by the Mozambican Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Mozambique was then one of the ten fastest-growing economies in the world for two decades, according to the World Bank, but ended up plunged into financial upheaval.

Source: Lusa