As the date scheduled for the verdict and sentence in Mozambique's largest ever fraud case, 15 June, approaches, so attempts have once again been made to divert attention away from those responsible for the fraud, and onto the allegedly corrupt behaviour of Albano Silva, the lawyer for the defrauded bank, the BCM (and who also happens to be the husband of Prime Minister Luisa Diogo).
The fraud took place in mid-1996, as the BCM was being privatised. It involved the deposit of 67 dud cheques, totalling 144 billion meticais (14 million US dollars at the exchange rate of the time), in accounts opened at the BCM branch in the Maputo suburb of Sommerschield by members of the Abdul Satar business family.
Although the cheques were worthless, since they were drawn on accounts in the provinces that contained little or no money, or had even been closed down, the Sommerschield branch manager, Vicente Ramaya, credited them all to the Satar accounts.
The Satars then removed hard cash from the bank, changed much of it into foreign currency, and when the fraud was discovered, several of the family members fled abroad, first to South Africa, and then to Dubai.
Right from the start, the public prosecutor's office showed no interest in bringing the fraudsters to justice. The chief prosecutor initially appointed to deal with the case, Diamantino dos Santos, behaved as if he were actively in league with Vicente Ramaya.
In the late 1990s only two people fought tirelessly to bring the BCM fraud to trial. One was Albano Silva, whom the bank appointed as its lawyer as soon as the fraud was discovered. The other was the country's foremost investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso, who wrote a series of devastating articles and editorials on the fraud, and on the other dealings of the Satar family, notably in the years 1999-2000.
On 22 November 2000, Cardoso's voice was silenced for ever.
He was ambushed and gunned down just a few hundred metres from the office of his daily newsheet "Metical". Ramaya, the brothers Nini and Ayob Satar, and the three members of the hit squad that carried out the killing were sentenced to lengthy jail terms on 31 January 2003.
A year before Cardoso's murder, gunmen had also tried to eliminate Albano Silva. The bullet fired into his car on 29 November 1999, as he drove along one of Maputo's main thoroughfares, missed his head by a couple of centimetres.
Shortly after that attack, Cardoso wrote that Albano Silva "is one of the last, if not the last lawyer in Mozambique who accepts difficult cases, cases which involve personal risks...
This lawyer has faced, sometimes completely alone, the institutionalised cowardice of our (in)justice".
In short, Silva is one of the rare figures in the Mozambican legal system who has stood against organised crime. He almost paid for that with his life - and for month after month he has been subjected to a stream of bitter invective and insult, from Ramaya and the other BCM accused, from their lawyers, and from some of the less scrupulous quarters of the Mozambican media.
Right from the start of the BCM trial in December 2003, the strategy of Ramaya and the Satars was clear - it was to demonise Albano Silva, and make it appear as if it were the bank's lawyer who was in the dock.
The wild accusations against Silva even led, last week, to the lawyer being called before the Anti-Corruption Unit in the Attorney-General's Office. This incident spawned renewed vilification of Silva in two papers - the weekly "Zambeze", and the daily newsheet "Diario de Noticias", written by journalists, Alvarito de Carvalho and Paulo Machava, who had both previously been expelled from another weekly paper, "Savana".
In these articles, it was claimed that Silva had been summoned to the Anti-Corruption Unit, and when he failed to obey the summons, a warrant was issued for his arrest on the charge of "disobedience". Political interference is then said to have resulted in dropping the warrant.
There is no named source for these claims, and neither the head of the Anti-Corruption Unit, Isabel Rupia, nor the Attorney- General himself, Joaquim Madeira, commented publicly on their veracity. Serious doubt is cast on the story by Silva's own lawyer, Teodoro Waty, who put out a short statement on 3 June saying "I know nothing of any arrest warrant".
Waty said he had been notified on 2 June that his client should appear before the Anti-Corruption Unit - and Silva was questioned by Rupia that same day.
The story of the arrest warrant is something of a smokescreen, distracting attention from the substance of the matter - what are these accusations of corruption facing Silva, and where do they come from ?
The main one is the allegation that Silva offered Ramaya a bribe of half a million dollars shortly after the discovery of the fraud. The source for this claim is Ramaya himself, who alleged that Silva offered him the money in exchange for not implicating two members of the BCM board, Alberto da Costa Calu and Teotonio Comiche, in the fraud.
Ramaya claimed the bribe attempt took place in the presence of the then head of the BCM audit and inspection department, Jeremias Mizela.
But when Mizela took the witness stand, on 5 February, he recalled just one occasion when Ramaya and Silva had both been in his office. Ramaya had already been questioned about the fraud, and had claimed that other people were involved, but declined to name them.
"Ramaya was called to my office and Albano Silva asked him if he was prepared to denounce the others involved, or preferred to take sole responsibility for the money the bank had lost", Mizela said. But Ramaya's response was to start insulting Silva "and so I suspended the meeting. I firmly deny that Silva offered Ramaya a half million dollar bribe - not in my office, and not in my presence, at any rate".
So both Silva and Mizela have denied the story, which thus rests on the unsubstantiated word of the main suspect in the fraud case, Vicente Ramaya. One can only presume that the Anti- Corruption Unit did not read the trial transcript before calling in Silva.
A second claim is that Silva bribed the first team from the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC) that was investigating the fraud. This time there is some physical evidence - Silva did indeed send a cheque for 12 million meticais (about 1,000 dollars) to a PIC inspector in December 1996.
Was this a bribe ? If so, then we must conclude that corrupt Mozambican cops sell themselves very cheaply: a mere thousand dollars in a case that involved millions !
Mizela also explained this incident in court. In late December 1996, the PIC officers who had been working with the bank, often until late at night, asked if the BCM could supplement their meagre police salaries so that they could celebrate the New Year.
Mizela was sympathetic, but said the bank simply had no fund that could be used for such purposes. So he suggested they talk to Silva, who was receiving lawyers' fees from the bank and might be able to help them have a decent New Year's party. That, he said, was how Silva came to give the PIC team the cheque for 12 million meticais.
This very human gesture was perhaps unwise. It was certainly seized upon later by Silva's enemies. As the public prosecutor, Diamantino dos Santos should have been cooperating with Silva in bringing the fraudsters to justice. Instead he illicitly acquired the details of Silva's bank account, discovered the 12 million meticais cheque, and used this as the excuse to take the first PIC team off the case.
Dos Santos brought in a new team and, again according to Mizela's evidence, "pointed the investigation in the opposite direction - instead of investigating the branch where the fraud happened (Sommerschield), he turned his guns on the top leadership of the bank".
So was dos Santos a heroic investigator, tirelessly seeking the real culprits of the fraud ? Not at all ! After he was transferred to Beira, in mid-1997, it was discovered that he had completely disorganised the BCM case file, and key documents provided by the bank had gone missing.
It was not until the thorough shake-up of the Attorney- General's Office in 2000 that the BCM file was painstakingly reorganised. By then suspicion had fallen on Diamantino dos Santos for other criminal activities. He was accused of stealing tonnes of fuel from a boat seized and held in Beira port on the orders of a local court. A warrant was issued for his arrest in January 2001, but he fled the country before it could be served.
The lawyers defending the BCM accused are following faithfully in Diamantino dos Santos' footsteps. Unable to defend the actions of their clients, they accuse Silva of corruption and of various procedural irregularities. According to their theory, Silva is covering up the real criminals, who are to be found among the former BCM directors. These directors (Calu, Comiche, and the former chairman of the board, Augusto Candida) were all hauled before the court - but the defence lawyers were unable to shoot any serious holes in their testimony. Silva himself has accused these lawyers of waging a "malicious campaign" against him. He told the weekly paper "O Pais" that "the purpose of this whole dirty game is to slander my person. None of these accusations has any basis".
As for whether the "Zambeze" stories against Silva, written by Alvarito de Carvalho, and based overwhelmingly on anonymous sources, have any credibility, some light is thrown on them by a separate story appearing under Carvalho's byline in the latest issue of the paper.
This claimed that the Attorney-General's Office "has been forced, for political motives to shelve a series of summonses" supposedly issued against Education Minister Alcido Nguenha, and other leading figures in the ruling Frelimo Party.
Allegedly Nguenha is untouchable because a case against him might compromise a Frelimo victory in the general elections, and because it was Nguenha "who led the campaign for Armando Guebuza's election as general secretary of Frelimo at the party's congress in Matola (in 2002)".
This time Madeira reacted. Interviewed in the latest issue of the Sunday paper "Domingo", he said that he had never come under any pressure from anyone to shelve any cases. Carvalho's article claimed that Madeira "says that he knows about the matter, but when he wanted to provide more details the phone line went dead".
Judging from Madeira's remarks to "Domingo", this story seems false. Madeira pointed out that it would be illegal to give out information about cases still under investigation.
"We are still making our inquiries, and articles are already appearing in papers with false information", he said. "An investigation takes its time to gather evidence. But there are people who are hungry to see certain figures condemned".
"We have not been put under pressure, and we shall continue the investigations normally", Madeira added. "We are at the phase of preparatory investigation, which is secret, it's sub judice".
Rupia also spoke to "Domingo" and denied any pressure had been put on the Anti-Corruption Unit. "What the paper ("Zambeze") says is not true, and I don't know any of what they're talking about", she said.
As for the insinuation that Guebuza was somehow involved, "I've never spoken to the Frelimo General Secretary", she said.
A little knowledge of recent Frelimo history makes it easy to dismiss the story that Nguenha mobilised support for Guebuza at the Frelimo Congress. For Guebuza was not elected Secretary- General at the Congress.
The 15 member Frelimo Political Commission put forward a short list of four candidates to the Central Committee. It was among 156 members of the Central Committee that the election took place, five days before the congress began, and Guebuza won overwhelmingly, with 76 per cent of the votes cast. Furthermore, if Nguenha really was such a key figure in Guebuza's election, then why, at the first Central Committee meeting after the Congress, was he dropped from the Political Commission ?
Since this story by Alvarito de Carvalho is so patently unreliable, it is hard to see why we should regard other stories appearing under his byline as trustworthy .
Fonte: AIM
