Taipo trail: Defendant admits contracts were forged – AIM report

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Taipo trail: Defendant admits contracts were forged – AIM report

7:39 CAT | 13 Apr 2022

Photo: Noticias

Anastacia Zitha, the former National Director of Migrant Labour in the Mozambican Labour Ministry, on Tuesday shifted responsibility for forging contracts onto her former subordinate, Jose Mondlane.

Zitha is one of 11 people, of whom the most prominent is former Labour Minister Helena Taipo, accused of stealing 113 million meticais (about 1.8 million dollars, at the current exchange rate) from the Ministry’s Migrant Labour Directorate (DTM) in 2014-15. She is the last of the defendants to be questioned by the Maputo City Court.

Zitha admitted that fake contracts were invented to justify DTM expenditure to the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption (GCCC). One of these contracts, for more than six million meticais, was with the company “Bela Eventos”. That money had supposedly paid for an event for former migrant mineworkers and their dependents, but in reality it had never happened.

In the search for documents to justify expenditure, Zitha relied on the collaboration of her husband, Mauricio Xerinda, who contacted Bela Eventos, opening the path for Mondlane to negotiate the fake contract.

In his own testimony, Mondlane had not mentioned the deal with Bela Eventos. He had, however, admitted to arranging a fake contract with the company Ve-tagres, through which he had obtained receipts and invoices used to justify to the GCCC expenditure of 14 million meticais supposedly invested in projects of social reinsertion for the returning miners, in the southern provinces.

The defendants allege that there had been real projects, with real invoices, but they had somehow “disappeared”, from the DTM, so they decided to replace them with forged documents.

“The person who designed and typed up the prototype of the contracts was my colleague Jose Mondlane, and I signed for he DTM in my capacity as director”, said Zitha.

Zitha also revealed that another of the accused, Pedro Taimo, had been one of the signatories on a cheque for two million meticais issued in favour of the company Indo-Mobil, subcontracted by Mulher Investimentos, a company owned by his wife, Josefina Taimo, which had a contract with the DTM.

But earlier in the trial, Pedro Taimo had categorially denied any involvement in payments made to companies that had signed contracts with the DTM. He said he did not even know that his wife’s company had been hired to provide services to the DTM. Taimo’s claims were undone by Zitha’s testimony, and by the copy of the two million meticais cheque in the possession of the court.

As for the use made of fees paid by companies for the hire of foreign labour, which should have been channelled to the Treasury, and the sums taken from an account holding unclaimed miners’ wages, Zitha repeated the explanation given last week by Helena Taipo.

She claimed the money was used to pay the deferred wages owed to miners who had just returned from the South African mines, and who were threatening to cause disturbances if the wages were not paid.

“These sums were used to advance the deferred wages, but they were later reimbursed in full”, said Zitha. “I recall that the Minister (Taipo) sent a note to the Ministry of Finance informing it of the matter”.

She admitted that normal procedures for paying expenditure were violated, but blamed this on the Finance Ministry, which had supposedly promised, in 2012, to channel 91 million meticais to the DTM for earmarked expenditure. But this money never showed up.

Zitha believed this justified the DTM seeking alternative ways of paying for activities that were already planned.

Zitha’s testimony is continuing on Wednesday.

Source: AIM