Mozambique: New case against Manuel Chang ‘Kafkaesque’ – Andre Thomashausen

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Mozambique: New case against Manuel Chang ‘Kafkaesque’ – Andre Thomashausen

2:37 CAT | 30 Nov 2022

File photo: Lusa

South African academic and lawyer André Thomashausen on Tuesday called the latest case brought by the Mozambican Public Prosecutor against former Finance Minister Manuel Chang, who has been jailed for four years in South Africa at the request of the United States, “Kafkaesque”.

“It is Kafkian and inconceivable. One does not understand this alleged corruption with [Brazilian construction company] Odebrecht. It has nothing to do with the hidden debt, it is a separate matter, and it is possible that there may have been some favours. It is one more case, but insignificant in the context of the hidden debts case which has a huge amount of two billion euros missing and unaccounted for, and on the instruction of the then Finance Minister Manuel Chang paid by the banks, which had made the loan to a private account in the United Arab Emirates, in Abu Dhabi, belonging to a private company, an enormous loan contracted by Mozambique which is then paid to a private bank account,” Thomashausen told Lusa.

The recent indictment is part of a second criminal corruption trial Manuel Chang is facing in Mozambique and is related to alleged undue payments made by Brazilian construction company Odebrecht to the former finance minister and three other defendants, including former transport and communications minister Paulo Zucula, according to a statement from the Mozambican Public Prosecutor’s Office, which Lusa had access to on Tuesday.

“In these terms, at the end of the investigative phase, on 31 August 2022, in the form of a common process, Manuel Chang was charged with the following crimes, passive corruption for an illicit act, economic participation in business, abuse of office or function and money laundering,” the statement from the Mozambican Public Prosecutor said.

The Central Office for Combating Corruption (GCCC) did not specify the amounts involved in the investigation.

Manuel Chang is the target of two competing extradition requests from the United States of America (USA) and Mozambique. It has been detained in South Africa since December 2018 under a US arrest warrant.

The extradition to the United States of Manuel Chang, ordered by a South African court in November 2021, is still not “enforceable” while a request for appeal by the government of Mozambique is pending in the South African justice system, the South African lawyer told Lusa.

In the view of the retired professor of the University of South Africa (Unisa), the recent accusation of the Mozambican Public Prosecutor against Manuel Chang will not influence the process of extradition of the former minister to the USA.

“We are at the end of the race. It is the last petition they can still make, this appeal to the Supreme Court to be allowed an appeal against the judgment of the Gauteng Court, which ordered his extradition to the US,” underlined André Thomashausen, who is a specialist in international and comparative law.

In November last year, the Mozambican government asked South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) in Bloemfontein for permission to appeal against the decision of the Gauteng High Court and simultaneously submitted a request for direct access to the Constitutional Court (ConCourt) in Pretoria, which in its view “is in the best 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 the extradition of former Finance Minister Manuel Chang to the US. The SCA has not yet ruled.

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 of more than US$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 the president at the time, Armando Guebuza, Filipe Nyusi’s predecessor, without the knowledge of parliament or the Administrative Court in the country.

Source: Lusa