HIDDEN DEBTS: SISE DIRECTOR UNDERMINES ROSARIO’S TESTIMONY

In less than an hour of questioning on Friday, a senior official in Mozambique’s Security and Intelligence Service (SISE) undid much of the ten days of testimony given by the former head of economic intelligence in SISE, Antonio Carlos do Rosario, at the trial in Maputo of 19 people facing charges in connection with Mozambique’s largest financial scandal, known as the case of the “hidden debts”.

Joia Haquirene, the first witness called in the case, is a National Director of Counter-Intelligence in SISE. Few people can know the security service better than Haquirene. He joined the service (then known as SNASP) in 1979, when he was just 17 years old and worked his way up.

In 2011, he became a founding partner owning 30 per cent of GIPS, the SISE company which went on to become a shareholder in the three fraudulent companies at the heart of the “hidden debts” case – Proindicus, Ematum (Mozambique Tuna Company) and MAM (Mozambique Asset Management). But Haquirene claimed he knew next to nothing about those companies, even though Rosario had stressed how central they were supposed to be to Mozambican security. In December 2012, a general meeting of GIPS agreed to subscribe to the share capital of Proindicus. Haquirene thought nothing of it. “For me, this was always not very relevant”, he said. “I was just called on to sign the papers and I did so”.

He could not remember what the purpose of Proindicus was – “I was just following orders”, he said.

“Did you take part in the Proindicus viability study?”, asked prosecutor Sheila Marrengula, “No, I never saw it”, he replied.

Did he know anything about the Integrated Monitoring and Protection System (SIMP)? Haquirene said he had never heard of it.

SIMP was the justification for all three companies. Rosario had argued that SIMP was vital for Mozambican coastal security, and the protection of Mozambique’s Exclusive Economic Zone. Proindicus, Ematum and MAM were all part of SIMP. Yet here was a very senior SISE officer, of the same rank as Rosario (national director) who had never heard of SIMP, and did not regard the three companies as particularly significant for SISE work. All that Rosario had argued about the centrality of SIMP, and the vital nature of the three companies for Mozambican security, thus collapsed under a couple of minutes of Marrengula’s questioning.

Did he know anything about SISE “operational vehicles”?, the prosecutor asked. This was another term Haquirene had never come across before. “The only vehicles I know about are cars that drive along the streets”, he quipped. Yet Rosario had spoken at length about SISE’s use of “operational vehicles”, companies which SISE used, sometimes without their owners’ knowledge. Clearly this security hijacking of companies, which Rosario seemed to regard as everyday intelligence work, had never crossed Haquirene’s mind.

The main “operational vehicle” mentioned by Rosario was Txopela Investments, a company through which bribes from the Abu Dhabi based group Privinvest were channeled. But Haquirene knew nothing about Txopela. So if other senior SISE officials knew nothing of what Rosario was doing, could he really be said to have worked for Mozambican security at all? (Paul Fauvet)