DEATH OF BUSINESSWOMAN

Candida Cossa, a businesswoman accused of involvement in the murder, in November 2000, of Mozambique’s top investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, died in Maputo, from an unspecified illness, on Thursday.And with her has died the so-called “autonomous case” – the separate, second file on the Cardoso assassination, opened during the first trial, which lasted from November 2002 to January 2003.The main suspect in the “autonomous case” was Nyimpine Chissano, the oldest son of former President Joaquim Chissano, who died of a heart attack in November 2007. Yet the case staggered fitfully on, with judge Dimas Marroa taking evidence from Cossa and others in September. But since dead people cannot stand trial, the case is now over – a monument to the lethargy and incompetence that is so damaging to the Mozambican legal system.The first trial found six people guilty of the murder. Judge Augusto Paulino found that three business figures – former bank manager Vicente Ramaya, loan shark Momad Assife Abdul Satar (“Nini”), and his brother Ayob Abdul Satar, owner of the Unicambion foreign exchange bureau – had ordered the murder. They hired a man described by Paulino as “an habitual delinquent”, car thief Anibal dos Santos Junior (“Anibalzinho”), to organise a death squad. He recruited Carlitos Rachid, a deserter from the army, who fired the shots that killed Cardoso, and Manuel Fernandes, who was the lookout. Anibalzinho himself drove the car used in the murder. For the prosecution, the motive for the assassination was clear. Ramaya and the Abdul Satar family were at the heart of a huge bank fraud through which the equivalent of 14 million US dollars was siphoned out of Ramaya’s branch of the country’s largest bank, the BCM, on thee eve of its privatization in 1996.Cardoso investigated the fraud tenaciously, naming those involved in his paper, the daily newsheet “Metical”. He demanded that the Mozambican prosecution service take the case seriously and bring those involved to justice. Cardoso’s writings were certainly part of the reason why the then Attorney-General, Antonio Namburete, and all six assistant attorney-generals, were sacked in mid-2000, depriving Ramaya and the Satars of the shield they had previously enjoyed. It was at this point that the conspirators decided that Cardoso was too dangerous to remain alive.But Nini Satar had an alternative story. During the trial, he admitted paying Anibalzinho for the assassination – but claimed that the money was actually a loan to Nyimpine Chissano. Satar said that Chissano asked for a loan of 1.2 billion old meticais (about 50,000 US dollars at the exchange rate of the time), but stipulated that the money must be paid to Anibalzinho. Satar said he had no idea the money was for a contract killing.He said Chissano repaid with a series of post-dated cheques. Oddly enough, Satar had never cashed these cheques, and in court he produced seven cheques signed by Chissano, on an account of his company Expresso Tours, totalling 1.29 billion meticais (the initial loan, plus what Satar called his “commission”).The cheques certainly proved that there were dealings between Satar and Chissano, but it was a large leap from that to the assumption that the money paid for the killing.Candida Cossa entered the story, because Satar had told the chief investigator, Antonio Frangoulis, that he had attended conspiratorial meetings with Chissano and his business partner Apolinario Pateguana at Cossa’s house. Later Satar denied this version and claimed he had only heard about meetings in Candida Cossa’s house from Anibalzinho.These claims were serious enough for Paulino to call both Chissano and Cossa to the witness stand. Both cut miserable figures. Chissano denied borrowing any money from Satar, and claimed the postdated cheques were guarantees of repayment of a loan, not from Satar, but from Cossa. Cossa had then allegedly “negotiated” the cheques with Unicambios. The only meetings at Cossa’s house, he said, were social gatherings, and neither Satar nor Anibalzinho had been present.Cossa herself gave a completely different story. She said she was seriously in debt (to the tune of 130,000 dollars) to Nini Satar, who sent men round to threaten her. She then appealed to Chissano and Pateguana for help, and they assured Satar that Cossa would soon have the money to redeem the debt.Complex financial transactions followed, in which further debts, this time amounting to 1.29 billion meticais, were contracted from Satar. Cossa’s testimony was highly damaging to Chissano since it painted a picture of regular contacts between Expresso Tours and Nini Satar, a man with whom Chissano denied doing any business. The waters were muddied because Cossa changed her evidence in the middle of the trial. She started testifying on 6 December 2002, a Friday, Paulino adjourned proceedings over the weekend, and on Monday 9 December she suddenly recalled that she had personally taken the seven mysterious cheques round to Satar, thus providing a neat explanation for how the cheques fell into Satar’s hands.Then the “autonomous case” was opened, and in January prosecutors spoke to Cossa, whereupon she performed a volte-face. The minutes of this meeting showed that Cossa had committed perjury. She changed her story, because Chissano had asked her to. She agreed to lie for him in December, but in January she admitted she knew nothing about the cheques presented by Satar, and had no idea what business they referred to. Given radically different versions – from Satar, Chissano and Cossa – about the cheques, it made sense for prosecutors to try and unravel the truth and see if Chissano did indeed have anything to do with the Cardoso murder.But the case stalled. No new evidence was forthcoming, but the prosecutors dealing with the matter failed either to move to a trial or to shelve the case for lack of proof. Other cases linked with the murder went ahead. Thus in December 2005, Anibalzinho received his second trial. At the first trial he was absent, since he had escaped from prison in September 2002. He was re-arrested in South Africa, and the Supreme Court granted him a retrial. During his testimony, Anibalzinho thrust all the blame for the murder onto the shoulders of Ramaya and the Satars, and denied any contact with Nyimpine Chissano.In April 2008 Anibalzinho was back in court, this time accused of involvement in the attempted murder in 1999 of Albano Silva, lawyer for the BCM. By this time Nyimpine Chissano was dead, and Anibalzinho’s story changed accordingly. Now he claimed that Cardoso’s murder had been ordered by Chissano at meetings held, not at the home of Candida Cossa, but in Nini Satar’s house.The case against Chissano thus boiled down to seven postdated cheques, and the word of a man who changed his evidence from one trial to the next. For the last five years of his life the case hung over Nyimpine Chissano. He was never given the chance of a formal trial at which he could have tried to clear his name. And the Mozambican public was never allowed to hear whether there was anything more substantial in the charges against Chissano than the contradictory claims of two convicted killers.Candida Cossa died just a fortnight short of the tenth anniversary of Cardoso’s assassination, and almost eight years after the “autonomous case” was opened. Eight years in which the prosecution services did virtually nothing to prove or disprove the accusations. Instead of doing their job, they preferred to while away the time until the suspects both died.