Prominent Mozambican lawyer Domingos Arouca is suing the Maputo weekly "O Pais" for alleged libel against his family.
According to Wednesday's issue of the independent newsheet "Mediafax", after waiting months for an apology and correction from "O Pais", which never came, Arouca has now lodged a formal complaint against the paper with the Maputo City Attorney's office.
The case arises out of a case of mistaken identity. On 13 December last year, "O Pais" published a piece in which it claimed that Arouca's son was one of the 17 defendants in the country's largest fraud trial.
This was the case of the theft of 144 billion meticais (about 14 million US dollars at the exchange rate of the time) from the Commercial Bank of Mozambique (BCM) in 1996, on the eve of its privatisation.
Domingos Arouca was one of the defence lawyers in the trial (acting for Ayob Abdul Satar, one of the businessmen charged in connection with the fraud). No doubt "O Pais" thought this was a great story - father and son in court, one in the dock, and the other defending the alleged criminal.
But although there is an Arouca among the defendants, he is not the lawyer's son. Antonio Arouca Junior was one of the managers of the company Chandling, whose cheques were used during the fraud.
Other journalists were cautious enough to ask whether Antonio Arouca was closely related to Domingos Arouca before rushing into print. But not only did "O Pais" jump to an unwarranted conclusion based merely on the name: it did not retract its claim later.
In the document claiming libel, which he has submitted to the Attorney's office, the lawyer wrote "Although it was warned several times, by some of its readers and other entities, that no son of Domingos Arouca is an accused in the BCM case, this paper never bothered to issue any denial, correction or even an apology for the false story that it published".
This behaviour by "O Pais", Arouca continued, "shows the bad faith of the paper and its unequivocal intention of defaming and injuring the honour, good name, dignity and social standing of the lawyer and his family, who have become the victims of unpleasant and unfair comments".
Arouca pointed out that, under the usual rules of journalistic ethics, the paper could have asked him, before publications, if the Arouca in the dock was his son. Or it could have asked Antonio Arouca if the lawyer was his father.
Since "O Pais" did neither, its "libellous intention" was clear, Arouca argued.
Fonte: AIM
