ATTORNEY-GENERAL WARNS OF THREAT FROM ORGANISED CRIME

Mozambique’s Attorney-General, Augusto Paulino, has warned it is likely that the real estate business in Mozambique is being used for money laundering.Giving a speech dealing with organised crime to the police academy (ACIPOL) on Monday, Paulino pointed out that the Mozambican economy is too small “to support buildings of the size of those that are springing up in the major cities, particularly in the capital”.Paulino gave no further details, but it is indeed true that a surprisingly large number of new hotels, enormous office blocks, and palatial private mansions have appeared in Maputo in recent years.He feared that states are not interested in serious investigations of money-laundering, particularly when the money being laundered comes from drugs, “because no state wants to be linked with the easy emergence and growth of these criminal activities”.Paulino noted that, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the three most profitable forms of organised crime are trafficking in drugs, in weapons and in people. In such trafficking Mozambique seems largely to act as a transit country.Mozambique cannot be a market for large quantities of illicit drugs, he said, but it seems to lie on the route of drug traffickers. He noted examples of large drug seizures, some of which have never been explained. The largest was the 40 tonnes of hashish, disguised as cashew nuts, and seized in two trucks in 1998. Only a minor player, a man accompanying the drugs, was ever brought to trial, and to this day nobody will say who imported the hashish, or where it was being sent.As for trafficking in people, Paulino pointed out that the traffickers are sending Asian migrants via Mozambique to work in South Africa. There was also sexual trafficking, shown most clearly in a case currently before the South African courts of a brothel owner, Mozambique national Aldina dos Santos (more commonly known as “Diana”), who lured Mozambican girls into sexual slavery in South Africa, by promising them jobs.“Organised crime”, said Paulino, “attempts, and unfortunately succeeds, in penetrating the entrails of the legislative, executive and judicial power. It penetrates the police machinery and shackles those who are dedicated to the cause of the majority. There are men who, from the weakness of their soul, fall on the long march”.It was “from the key centres of power” that organised crime operates, said Paulino, giving as examples the Italian, Russian and American mafias, the Colombian drug cartels, and the Japanese Yakuza. He did not mention exactly how the phenomenon applies to Mozambique, but the warning was clear enough.Paulino also warned that “corruption and the dilapidation of public resources, fraud, capital flight and fiscal evasion undermine security, economic stability and good governance”.And sometimes foreign donors do not help, he added. “Congresses and seminars are organised to debate corruption and, in some cases, those financing the fight against corruption themselves become corruptors when they impose strange conditions on aid for the beneficiary”, he accused.To confront organised crime, the police need modern resources, said Paulino – but the shortage of resources in poor countries, leads to the available resources being channeled to what are regarded as “productive sectors” and since the police, the courts and the prosecution services are considered unproductive, “they receive fewer resources”.On top of this came procedural red tape which hindered the fight against modern financial and computer crimes. Paulino noted that the procedures for dealing with counterfeit and pirated goods are “slow, heavy, obsolete and anachronistic”.Modern police training, he added, should have a strong digital component. Police should learn how to use instruments such as Google Earth, in order to visualize strategic places without making direct and personal reconnaissance.“In this fight against crime, there is no half-way house”, warned Paulino. “Either we win, or the criminals win”.