Africa-Press – Mozambique. The Mozambican Attorney General’s Office (PGR) is appealing against the decision of the Gauteng High Court, in South Africa, announced on Wednesday to extradite former Mozambican Finance Minister Manuel Chang to the United States.
A Thursday press release from the PGR said the Mozambican authorities hope to take the case to the South African Constitutional Court.
The release must have been drafted in a hurry, because the appeal is not to the Constitutional Court at all, but, according to the government’s own South African lawyers, the law firm Mabunda Incorporated, to the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA),
Through his lawyers, Chang is requesting leave to appeal to the SCA on the grounds that the Guateng High Court “erred in fact and in law”, when it overruled the decision of Justice Minister Ronald Lamola that Chang should be extradited to Mozambique.
The Court, Mabunda Inc. continued, was mistaken in describing Lamola’s decision as “irrational”, and claims it obeyed both South Africa’s own Extradition Act, and the protocol of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) on extradition.
Rather than ordering Chang’s extradition to South Africa, it added, the court should have sent the matter back to Lamola “for a fresh decision”.
Chang has been in South African police custody since 28 December 2018, when he was arrested at Johannesburg airport while he was in transit to Dubai. He was arrested on the basis of an international arrest warrant, seeking his extradition to the US, where he faces charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering, wire fraud and securities fraud, in connection with the scandal of Mozambique’s “hidden debts”.
This term refers to loans of over two billion US dollars which three fraudulent, security related companies, Proindicus, Ematum (Mozambique Tuna Company), and MAM (Mozambique Asset Management) obtained from the banks Credit Suisse and VTB of Russia.
The loans were only possible because the Mozambican government of the time, under President Armando Guebuza, issued illicit loan guarantees. The man who signed those guarantees was Manuel Chang, even though he was well aware that they violated the ceiling set on loan guarantees in the 2013 and 2014 budget laws.
Without Chang’s signature on the guarantees, the loans could not have gone ahead. With his signature, however, the Mozambican state became committed to repaying the loans, if the companies defaulted – which they soon did. It was Chang’s signature that turned hidden loans into hidden debts.
The US prosecutors believes that the former Minister can be tried in the US because when the loans were syndicated, or turned into bonds, American investors, purchased them, unaware of their illicit nature. Furthermore, when the sole contractor for Proindicus, Ematum and MAM, the Abu Dhabi based group Privinvest, skimmed off at least 200 million dollars of the loan money to pay bribes and kickbacks, it used the US financial system to do so.
If extradited to Mozambique, Chang will face different charges, including corruption, violation of budgetary legality, abuse of office, embezzlement, money laundering and criminal conspiracy.
Chang has remained in custody while South African courts and ministers have argued over the competing extradition claims from Mozambique and the US.
It is not known how long the new appeal will take – but it could well mean that Manuel Chang is facing his third Christmas in a South African jail.
Commenting on the decision of the Gauteng High Court, a spokesperson for the US Justice Department, Nicole Navas, cited by the Portuguese news agency Lusa, said that justice “would be better served” by extraditing Chang to the US.
The US, she said, would continue fighting to bring all those involved in the “hidden debts” to trial.
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