Hidden debts Trial adjourned for a week

Judge Efigenio Baptista, of the Maputo City Court, on Thursday adjourned for a week the country’s largest ever corruption trial, the case of the “hidden debts”.

He had little choice in the matter. 

On Tuesday he had removed from the case Alexandre Chivale, the lawyer for one of the key accused, Antonio Carlos do Rosario, the former head of economic intelligence in the Mozambican Intelligence and Security Service (SISE), who became chairperson of the three fraudulent companies at the heart of the scandal. Baptista accepted the argument from prosecution attorney Sheila Marrengula that Chivale’s role in SISE placed him in an intractable conflict of interest. Rosario had declared, on 5 October that Chivale “is a SISE collaborator”, something which, at the time, only evoked a smile from the lawyer.

 It was two weeks before Chivale denied Rosario’s claim, and by then it was too late. Both Marrengula and Baptista accepted that Rosario had been telling the truth. This meant that Chivale worked for the state, even if only in an informal role. People who work for the state cannot defend clients in conflict with the state (and in this case the conflict is enormous, since the prosecution is demanding that the 19 defendants in the hidden debts case compensate the state to the tune of over 2.9 billion dollars).

 Rosario has now appointed Isalcio Mahanjane as his new lawyer. Another of Chivale’s clients, Ines Moiane, once the private secretary of former President Armando Guebuza, also asked Mahanjane to represent her, Mahanjane is already one of the lawyers representing Ndambi Guebuza, the oldest son of the former president. On Thursday morning, Mahanjane immediately asked Baptista to grant a five day adjournment,so that he can study the case (even though he should already be very familiar with it, given his work for Ndambi Guebuza). Since it is standard procedure to grant such an adjournment when a suspect changes his lawyer, Baptista adjourned the trial until 28 October.