The Maputo City Court on Tuesday sentenced seven people to prison sentences of between eight and a half and 14 years for their part in Mozambique's largest ever bank fraud.
A further ten accused were acquitted for lack of evidence of their direct involvement in the fraud.
This fraud, involving sums of 144 billion meticais (about 14 million US dollars at the exchange rate of the time), was committed against what was then the country's largest bank, the BCM, on the eve of, and immediately after, its privatisation in 1996.
The case has taken so long to come to court because of serious corruption in the public prosecutor's office. Indeed, the prosecutor initially in charge of the case, Diamantino dos Santos, is currently a wanted man, and his whereabouts are unknown.
The fraud is intimately linked with two other sensational cases. The fraudsters attempted to eliminate the two men who most inconvenienced them. In one case they succeeded: the country's top investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, who had campaigned tirelessly for the BCM case to come to trial, was assassinated on 22 November 2000.
A year earlier, on 29 November 1999, the BCM's lawyer, Albano Silva, narrowly escaped a similar fate, when a bullet was fired into his moving car, missing his head by a couple of centimetres.
Tuesday's verdict and sentence followed the longest trial in Mozambican history, which began in mid-December 2003. The court's ruling, delivered by judge Achirafo Abdul, took almost seven hours to read. It outlined, in great detail, the cases of the prosecution and the defence, and then explained what the court had considered proven, and not proven, for each of the 17 defendants.
The court found that, in early 1996, several members of the Abdul Satar business family, and Vicente Ramaya, manager of the branch of the country's largest bank, the BCM, in the Maputo suburb of Sommerschield, conspired to defraud the bank.
Accounts were opened in the Sommerschield branch in the names of Asslam Abdul Satar, his brother Momade Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini"), their parents, Abdul Karim Abdul Satar and Hawabay Abdul Latifo, Asslam's close friend, Yasser Mahomed, and two of Asslam's companies.
Between 26 March and 9 August 1996, these seven accounts were fed with 67 dud cheques totalling 144 billion meticais (about 14 million US dollars at the exchange rate of the time).
The cheques were worthless - they were drawn on accounts in BCM branches in the provinces that contained little or no money, or had even been closed.
Had proper banking procedures been followed the cheques would have been sent back to the originating branches, and would have bounced. But Ramaya intervened personally to credit each and every one of the cheques to the Satar accounts.
Ramaya's defence was that the cheques were all guaranteed, but that the Sommerschield computer was malfunctioning and refused to recognise them as guaranteed. So he intervened legitimately to credit them to his clients.
The court, however, found that none of the cheques was guaranteed, and that Ramaya's overriding of the computer was illegal, and a main reason for the success of the fraud. Based on the evidence given by computer technicians, the court decided that the computer malfunction claimed by Ramaya never existed.
The court also found that Ramaya ensured that all 67 fraudulent cheques disappeared from the banking circuit. He kept the BCM Maputo office in the dark, by sending it information that did not reflect the true state of the accounts in his branch.
When the fraud was discovered, Asslam and Nini Satar, their parents, and Yasser Mahomed fled the country, first for South Africa and then for Dubai. Only Nini Satar and Mahomed later returned, and so they were the only holders of the fraudulent accounts on trial. The court found that the conspiracy to defraud also included those people who had provided cheque books for the use of Asslam and Nini Satar.
Thus Asslam's employee, Henrique da Cruz, was sent to the northern city of Nampula, specifically to open an account, and obtain a cheque book, which he obediently handed over to Asslam.
Asslam's girlfriend Sheraz Banu travelled to Tete to do exactly the same. A couple of small traders in Zambezia province, Brito and Isaltina Companhia, also provided cheques.
These accounts in Nampula, Tete and Zambezia contained next to no money. Yet cheques were written on them for many billions of meticais and credited to the Sommerschield accounts.
Cruz, Banu and the Companhias told the court essentially the same story: their cheque books had been stolen, and they had no idea that Asslam Satar was using them to defraud the bank. The court did not swallow this and found them all guilty.
The longest prison sentence, 14 years, was imposed on Nini Satar. Achirafo sentenced Ramaya to 12 years, and Yasser Mahomed to nine.
As for the suppliers of the cheques, the court sentenced Henrique da Cruz to 10 years, and Isaltina Companhia (who has absconded, and was tried in absentia) to nine years. Brito Companhia and Sheraz Banu each received sentences of eight and a half years.
Two other members of the Satar family were acquitted. The court did not find it proven that Ayob Satar, owner of the foreign exchange bureau Unicambios, had participated in the fraud. Although Nini Satar used Unicambios as his base when he set about converting the meticais stolen from the BCM into hard currency, and although Ayob had received cheques totalling 1.5 billion meticais from his brother, it was not clear that he was aware of the criminal origins of this money.
After the fraud was discovered, Farida Abdul Satar found one of the fraudulent cheques in a drawer in Asslam's company, Organizacoes Continente, and tried to deposit it in her account at a different bank, the BPD. The BPD treated the cheque correctly and it bounced.
The court thought it unlikely that she had known about the fraud. The fact that she had tried to put the cheque in the BPD, a bank that had nothing to do with the case, and not the BCM, was strong evidence that she was ignorant of the mechanisms of the fraud. "It's not proven that she was trying to defraud the BCM", said Achirafo.
A third of the fraudulent cheques were drawn on accounts held in the southern cities of Xai-Xai and Maxixe by the company Chandling International. So two directors of Chandling, Antonio Arouca Junior and Dinis Maculuve, found themselves among the accused.
The court had no doubt that somebody at Chandling had passed the cheque books on to Asslam and Nini Satar. But who ? Arouca ?
Maculuve ? Both of them ? Or other officials of the company ?
Achirafo said this was one of the thorniest decisions the court had to make - eventually it decided to give Arouca and Maculuve the benefit of the doubt, and acquitted them.
At Nini Satar's request, a Unicambios worker, Antonio Medeiros, opened an account at the BCM branch in the Maputo suburb of Polana. This was one of the conduits used by Satar to move the stolen money out of Sommerschield and into other accounts before turning it into cash. But the court acquitted Medeiros since it was not clear he knew about the origins of the money passing through his account.
Five other workers at the Sommerschield branch were acquitted. Achirafo said there was no evidence of wrongdoing by Ligia Pires (Ramaya's deputy) or one of the cashiers, Ricardo Novela.
He severely criticised the other three, Mario Fernandes, Madelena Farinha, and Virginia Chavanguane, for their negligence, but they too were given the benefit of the doubt. It was possible they were just careless rather than participating actively in the fraud.
Achirafo concluded by pointing out that an acquittal is not an indication that the court believes in the suspect's innocence - merely that it has doubts. It worked on the principle that it was better to let a guilty person go free, than send an innocent one to prison.
Defence lawyers for those found guilty immediately announced that they would appeal. They have five days to lodge appeals, which have the effect of suspending the sentence.
Ramaya, and Nini and Ayob Satar, however, will remain in prison, since they are already serving long prison sentences for the murder of Carlos Cardoso.
Fonte: AIM
