Tuesday's verdict in Mozambique's largest bank fraud by no means brings the matter to a close.
First, judging from the immediate reactions of their lawyers, six of the seven people sentenced to prison terms for defrauding the Commercial Bank of Mozambique (BCM) of the equivalent of 14 million US dollars, will appeal (the seventh was tried in absentia).
Appeals, after the public prosecutor's office has given its opinion, rise to the Supreme Court, which is already faced with a huge backlog of such work.
It could be months - or even years - before the appeals are heard. The men found guilty of murdering the country's top investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, were sentenced to lengthy jail terms on 31 January 2003, and they promptly appealed. But over 16 months later, the Supreme Court has still not dealt with these appeals.
With the exception of Vicente Ramaya, who was manager of the BCM's Sommerschield branch where the fraud took place, and notorious loan shark Momade Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini"), who are already serving sentences for the Cardoso murder, those found guilty on Tuesday are still at liberty.
In their cases, the appeal has the effect of suspending the sentence. The obvious danger is that some of them may try to flee the country.
Two had strong ties with the man regarded as one of the architects of the fraud, Asslam Abdul Satar, who is currently a fugitive in Dubai. Yasser Mahomed was a close friend of Asslam Satar and, at the time of the fraud, Sheraz Banu was his girlfriend. It would not be particularly surprising if they felt tempted to join Satar in Dubai.
The judge who sentenced them, Achirafo Abdul, has assured journalists that "measures of control" are in force. For years, they have been obliged to report to the police every 15 days.
They were also obliged to surrender their passports.
Achirafo said that, before and during the trial, the accused all scrupulously respected these restrictions. But now they have been found guilty, some additional precautions may be in order.
After all, it is not unknown for people to leave Mozambique without passports (or to hold several passports of different nationalities).
Then there is the case of those who are already fugitives.
One of those who provided cheques for the fraud, Isaltina Companhia, absconded and is believed to be somewhere in the United States.
So have the Mozambican authorities checked her whereabouts with the US embassy ? Since the terrorist attacks against New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, the US government has been understandably concerned at the possible presence of foreign criminals on its territory.
Isaltina Companhia has not merely been convicted of fraud: earlier she had escaped from a jail in Zambezia province where she was serving a sentence for arson. Since the United States is unlikely to welcome Mozambican arsonists and fraudsters on its territory, there is a perfectly real possibility of extraditing Companhia, if the reports are true and she is indeed in America.
But it is up to the Mozambican government to make the request.
Mozambique also has friendly relations with the United Arab Emirates, and has established a consulate in Dubai - the city where Asslam Satar and his parents, Abdul Karim Abdul Satar and Hawabay Abdul Latifo, took refuge after fleeing Mozambique when the fraud was discovered in August 1996.
A request to the UAE authorities for them to detain the Satars and send them to Mozambique might not be successful, but it should at least be tried. It is true that there is no extradition treaty between Mozambique and the UAE, but this is not necessarily an insuperable obstacle. After all there is no extradition treaty between Mozambique and Canada, but this has not stopped the Mozambican government from requesting the extradition of the fugitive Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), the man who led the death squad that murdered Carlos Cardoso, who escaped from the Maputo top security prison, and was detained at Toronto International Airport on 21 May.
The trial also provided clues that may lead towards other people implicated in the fraud. In particular, Achirafo noted the peculiar behaviour of the BCM branches in Nampula and Mocuba.
In mid-May 1996, Asslam Satar opened accounts for himself and for his company Organizacoes Continente in Nampula. The deputy branch manager, Jose Valente, allowed the accounts to be opened, even though Asslam lived 2,000 kilometres away, in Maputo.
On 8 July 1996, Satar sent his employee Henrique da Cruz to open another account in Nampula. Again, although Cruz lived in Maputo, the Nampula BCM immediately opened the account and gave him a cheque book the same day.
The Cruz cheques were given to Satar and then used exclusively for the fraud. In August, Asslam claimed the cheque book had been stolen, and told Cruz to return to the BCM-Nampula and get another one. He did so and the Nampula branch, without the slightest investigation, handed over another cheque book, again on the same day the request was made. As for Mocuba, this was the branch where Isaltina Companhia obtained her cheque book. The BCM-Mocuba froze her account in 1993, but on 6 May 1996 she asked for authorisation to operate it again (even though it contained almost no money).
The following day, the Mocuba branch manager said she could use the account, but would not be issued with any cheque book.
But on 8 May something made him change his mind, and Companhia was issued with a new cheque-book. Those cheques promptly found their way into the hands of Asslam Satar, and were used to steal billions of meticais from the BCM.
The behaviour of Nampula and Mocuba BCM officials is much more worthy of investigation than wild stories by Nini Satar about the delivery of suitcases full of banknotes in the dead of night to the home of Teotonio Comiche, a member of the BCM board of directors.
Satar and Ramaya tried to pin blame for the fraud on Comiche and other former members of the BCM board, and at one point Ramaya even claimed that the computer system in the Sommerschield branch had been deliberately corrupted on the orders of board members. If he was unable to prove that, he told Achirafo, "you can sentence me to 24 years imprisonment". Ramaya proved nothing of the sort, of course - such outbursts, a regular feature of the trial, were intended largely for the consumption of the press.
It is, of course, legitimate for prosecutors to look into the accusations against board members made by Satar and Ramaya.
But the accusations themselves cannot be regarded as constituting evidence.
Finally, there is the matter of compensation. Achirafo ordered the seven people found guilty to repay the money stolen.
Although the 67 dud cheques used in the fraud came to a total of rather more than 144 billion meticais, not all this money was removed from the accounts. The BCM found that about nine billion remained in the accounts of the Satar brothers and their accomplices in Sommerschield and elsewhere.
So the amount to be repaid, Achirafo ruled, is "the equivalent of 135 billion meticais in 1996." In other words, in calculating the full extent of compensation, the devaluation of the metical must be taken into account. That means the amount to be paid, in today's currency, is around 315 billion meticais.
It must be paid, not to the bank, but to the state. For the fraud was discovered, shortly after the privatisation of the BCM, and the government felt it had no option but to pay the money back to the new owners.
No money can be collected until the appeals have been heard.
This, however, gives time to those sentenced to sell off any assets they possess, and shift money out of the country. It would be a sensible precaution to freeze these assets - otherwise the state may end up with nothing at all.
Fonte: AIm
