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).
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