The document is clearly suggesting that Silva took money from the Mozambican treasury and used it to buy property in Portugal.
The man who signed this document is Faruk Gadit, a former colonial administrator, who has already clashed with Silva and Diogo over a house in Maputo which he claimed, but which the state housing agency, APIE, attributed to the Prime Minister's son, Nelson Diogo Silva.
The debt to the Treasury is owed, not by Silva personally, but by the company Inagrico (which specialises in providing pumps for petrol stations), in which Silva has a 25 per cent stake.
Several dozen companies borrowed money from the treasury, prior to 2002, when the Finance Ministry ended this type of loan.
The money was foreign aid (from Japan), channelled through the treasury to build up local businesses, on the understanding that the money would be paid back in local currency.
The issue of the treasury loans has always excited the opposition, and much of the press, because several of the beneficiary companies include leading figures of the ruling Frelimo Party among their shareholders. One of them, the fishing company Mavimbe, which received a two million dollar loan, counts President Armando Guebuza among its owners.
It is true that many of these loans are not being repaid.
The largest loan is not to any private company at all, but to the publicly owned Maputo bus company, TPM. This loan, of over three million dollars, shows no sign of being repaid.
A loan of about 1.4 million dollars went to Tecnica Industrial, part of the Portuguese group, Joao Ferreira dos Santos. Several companies part-owned by Jamu Hassan, best known for his membership of Invester, the local part of the Mozambican- Malaysian consortium that led the privatised Austral bank to ruin in 2001, also received loans. Some of these were being repaid, others not.
INAGRICO, however, is not among the chronic debtors.
According to Silva, the company has been paying the debt off at a rate of 7,500 dollars a month, which recently went up to 10,000 dollars a month. INAGRICO was on target for paying off the entire debt by 2008.
Furthermore the loan did not reach INAGRICO in the shape of cash, but of goods - that was how this form of Japanese aid worked.
INAGRICO produced a shopping list, international tenders were held and the goods were acquired (which is why the loan seems spread out over three years - but it is in fact just one credit). Since no money ever entered an INAGRICO account, it was physically impossible for the company's owners to help themselves to any of it.
As for the flat in Lisbon, Gadit says Silva and Diogo purchased it in April 2001 for 30 million Portuguese escudos "equivalent to 1.8 million US dollars".
AIM suggests that Gadit invest in a pocket calculator. For in 2001, the average exchange rate was 224 escudos to the US dollar. Thus 30 million escudos was worth just 133,870 dollars.
It is doubtful that anything bought for this sum could classify as a "luxury apartment".
How did Silva acquire this money ? He told AIM he took out a loan from the Portuguese state bank, the Caixa Geral de Depositos, repayable over 20 years. Under Portuguese law, it is perfectly acceptable for foreigners to buy property and take out bank loans.
Yet Gadit suggests there is something criminal about the loan - for he addressed the document to the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption (GCCC), and called for an investigation.
Gadit also threw in as something suspicious the allocation of the APIE house to Silva's son. Gadit's claim is that the procedure was highly improper because Nelson Silva was living and studying in Portugal at the time.
Silva denies this - he says his son was no longer in Portugal, but was studying in Maputo.
What is particularly dishonest about this section of Gadit's document is that he fails to mention that he has an interest in the house.
In 2005 Gadit claimed he was the rightful owner, and managed to persuade opposition deputies to argue his case on the floor of the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic.
Gadit was living in the house at the time of Mozambican independence in 1975. The following year, like all rented property, it was nationalised - any sitting tenant should have signed a contract with APIE.
But there is no such contract between Gadit and APIE. A couple of years after the nationalisation of rented housing, Gadit went to Portugal where he settled, and worked in the Portuguese civil service.
He returned to Mozambique in 1991, and subsequently attempted to reclaim the house - without success, since he cannot show any evidence that he was ever the owner or legitimate tenant.
No doubt it is this failure to reoccupy the house that has led Gadit to embark on his current vendetta against the Prime Minister and her husband.
SOURCE: AIM
