The “hidden debt” trial, one of Mozambique’s biggest corruption scandals that has plunged the country into a serious financial crisis and embarrasses even the top of the state, opened Monday in a Maputo prison.
Nineteen people accused of blackmail, forgery, embezzlement and money laundering, for amounts of several million euros, must be heard during hearings scheduled for nearly two months. Among them, the son of ex-president Armando Guebuza, Ndambi Guebuza.
Wrapped up in a coat, the latter was present like all the other defendants at the hearing which opened in the early morning in a makeshift court, a tent set up in the grounds of Machava high security prison, where he has been in pre-trial detention for two and a half years.
The country’s courts were deemed too small to accommodate the dozens of lawyers, witnesses and 250 journalists accredited to follow the case.
Between 2013 and 2014, three Mozambican public companies – ProIndicus, Ematum and Mam – took out loans for 1.76 billion euros, in particular with Credit Suisse and the Russian bank VTB to finance maritime surveillance and fishing projects. and shipyards.
This operation would in fact have covered a vast enterprise of corruption for the benefit of those close to power. Ndambi Guebuza is suspected of having played the “facilitator” with his father president. Among the accused is also the former head of the security services, Gregorio Leao.
The affair broke out in 2016, when the government revealed that it had contracted its loans without notifying Parliament or its donors. After this scandal, the IMF and most of the country’s donors, one of the poorest in the world, suspended their aid.
Maputo was forced to stop repaying its debt and its currency, the metical, collapsed, plunging the country into the most serious financial crisis since its independence in 1975.
This scandal, known as the “hidden debt”, is at the origin of several other legal proceedings in the United States, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The case also embarrasses the current president, Filipe Nyusi, implicated by testimony in a part of the case examined in the United States. Minister of Defense at the time, he is accused of having touched secret commissions.
Absent from the trial, the former Minister of Finance Manuel Chang, who also allegedly received several millions in bribes, was arrested in South Africa at the end of 2018. He will eventually be extradited to Mozambique, while the authorities Americans also demanded it, according to a document from the South African Ministry of Justice, of which AFP had a copy.
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