Africa-Press – Mozambique. Another senior official in the Mozambican security service, SISE, on Tuesday night contradicted the former head of economic intelligence in SISE, Antonio Carlos do Rosario, about the role of the shadowy businessman, Teofilo Nhangumele, in the scandal of Mozambique’s “hidden debts”.
Rosario, one of 19 people facing charges in connection with the debts, had told the Maputo City Court, during his lengthy testimony in October, that Nhangumele’s role had been at best marginal, and denied that he had been a SISE agent.
But when called as a witness, Raufo Ira, who had been Executive Director of the SISE Social Services, recalled that Nhangumele had been present at the meeting in the Defence Ministry on 31 December 2012 which gave instructions to set up Proindicus, the first of the three fraudulent companies at the heart of the debt scandal.
Ira was involved because the SISE Social Services was the majority shareholder in the company GIPS, which held 50 per cent of Proindicus.
He recalled that, on 8 January 2013, he was called to a meeting to sign the supply contract between Proindicus and the Abu Dhabi based group, Privinvest. He went with Rosario to the meeting, and there they met with Nhangumele accompanied by the Privinvest representative, Jean Boustani.
Boustani was a Privinvest salesman, who, according to documents shown by Mozambican and United states prosecutors, had distributed hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes both to Mozambican officials, and to managers of Credit Suisse, the bank that provided a 622 million dollar loan to Proindicus.
The version of events told by Nhangumele, and now supported by witnesses such as Ira, is that he was the driving force behind the creation of Proindicus, and responsible for introducing Mozambican officials to Privinvest.
Rosario had excluded Nhangumele’s group from his version of events. He painted Proindicus as part of an overarching security project known as SIMP (Integrated Monitoring and Protection System) which had been designed by SISE. It was thus a home-grown Mozambican project.
The alternative version is that the idea for Proindicus came from Privinvest, which used Nhangumele to sell it to the Mozambican defence and security forces.
Raoul Ira was also called upon to sign the founding documents of the other two companies, Ematum (Mozambique Tuna Company) and MAM (Mozambique Asset Management), in 2013 and 2014.
In all three cases, he just signed documents put in front of him. He said he had no role in negotiating or discussing the creation of the companies or any of their contracts – even though the SISE Social Services, via GIPS, was supposedly a major player in the whole scheme.
All the work on setting up the companies, and negotiating their contracts, he said, was dome by “the group coordinated by Antonio do Rosario”.
When the judge, Efigenio Baptista, asked him if the equipment for Proindicus had arrived and was fully functional, Ira said he could not confirm that. He knew that some of the equipment had worked, “but today I don’t know”.
He said that both Proindicus and Ematum had commercial and security components. His source for the security side of Ematum was just a verbal communication from Rosario. “It wasn’t in any documents”, he admitted.
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