HIDDEN DEBTS: PGR still wants Chang back in Maputo
Despite repeated setbacks in the South African courts, the Mozambican Attorney-General’s Office (PGR) is continuing its efforts to ensure that former Finance Minister Manuel Chang is extradited to Mozambique rather than to the United States.
Chang has been in South African police custody since December 2018, when he was detained at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg en route from Maputo to Dubai. He was held on the basis of an international arrest warrant issued by American prosecutors.
Both the Mozambican and the US prosecutors want Chang to stand trial for his role in Mozambique’s largest ever financial scandal, known as the case of the “hidden debts”. The term refers to the illicit loans of over two billion US dollars obtained by three fraudulent, security-linked companies, from the banks Credit Suisse and VTB of Russia.
The loans became debts because of illicit government loan guarantees that Chang signed in 2013 and 2014. All three companies went bankrupt, and the creditors are demanding their money back.
For three and a half years the South African authorities have been faced with the competing claims on Chang from Mozambique and the US. On two occasions South African justice ministers ordered that Chang be returned to Maputo, and on both occasions they were overruled by judges.
On Wednesday, a South African judge, Margaret Victor, threw out the application by the PGR for leave to appeal to the Johannesburg High Court against the court’s earlier decision that Chang should be extradited to the United States.
Judge Victor said the PGR had offered no compelling reasons why it should be granted leave to appeal and nor did its appeal have “a reasonable prospect of success”.
Not surprisingly, the PGR’s South African lawyer, Busani Mabunda, disagrees. Cited in Friday’s issue of the independent newssheet “Carta de Mocambique”, Mabunda confirmed that the PGR will now lodge an appeal with South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeals.
“This case is far from its end”, Mabunda added. “It might end up in the Constitutional Court, since this Court has never considered its merits”.
In fact, earlier this year the PGR sought leave to appeal directly to the Constitutional Court, but the court denied leave to appeal, declaring that it would not be in the interests of justice to hear the appeal “at this stage”. That qualifying phase, “at this stage”, does seem to leave the door open for a possible future appeal to the Constitutional Court.
Mabunda’s law firm has already done very well out of this case. According to “Carta de Mocambique”, it has so far received 1.5 million dollars from the PGR for its services, and if the PGR insists on yet another appeal it will be paid still more Mozambican public money.
(AIM)
