The Mozambican Attorney General, Beatriz Buchili, promised today in Praia to share documents still in time to avoid the annulment of the case of hidden debts in progress in the Commercial Court in London.
“I don’t know if it’s at risk, because we are currently in an interlocutory phase of disclosure of documents and we are working towards that,” the Attorney General said in Praia, where she is on an official visit at the invitation of her Cape Verdean counterpart, Jose Luis Landim.
In March, a British judge admitted overturning the hidden debt case underway in the Commercial Court in London due to Mozambique’s failure to share relevant documents in preparation for the trial in October.
In an opinion, judge Robin Knowles criticised the lack of involvement of British lawyers representing the Republic of Mozambique in the process of selecting official documents and urged the Mozambican Attorney General’s Office (PGR) to provide greater access.
“It is true that it is a process that has to be collected in various institutions and we have procedural deadlines, but we are coping to be able to comply with the legal procedures,” she promised.
Beatriz Buchili said that the last interlocutory hearing will be at the end of July and said she believed that Mozambique will be able to comply with the procedures.
At the time, during a preliminary hearing, the English judge said that Mozambique was not “complying with the disclosure obligations, especially with documents held by the office of the President, the SISE [State Information and Security Services] and the Council of State.
According to the magistrate, these state bodies did not allow either the OPG or the British lawyers any access to select any relevant documents.
The disclosure of documentary evidence by all parties, he said, is essential to “guarantee the fairness of the trial” and of a final decision.
The judge referred in particular to the Mozambican President, Filipe Nyusi, on whom the authorisation for access to confidential state documents depends, but who is also named in this process.
“If I need to exercise my power of annulment [‘strike out’] to ensure compliance with the Republic’s obligations and duties of disclosure, I will do so because it is my duty to ensure the fairness of the trial,” he stressed.
The magistrate said he will reserve the right to annul the case at any time, but even so gave the possibility to the OPG of Mozambique to try again to access the necessary documents and provide them to the other parties involved.
The Commercial Court, which is part of the High Court in London, is scheduled to begin the main trial on 3 October on the validity of the debts.
At the origin is a lawsuit initiated by PGR on behalf of the Republic of Mozambique against Credit Suisse and Prinvinvest to try to cancel part of the more than US$2.7 billion (€2.6 billion) of debt incurred between 2013 and 2014 by public companies to buy tuna fishing boats and maritime security equipment and services.
The loans were guaranteed by the government of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), led at the time by President Armando Guebuza, without the knowledge of parliament and the Administrative Court, which led to the denomination of “hidden debts”.
Several high public officials and state figures are named in the case, such as Guebuza, former finance minister Manuel Chang – detained in South Africa – and the current head of state, Filipe Nyusi, who was defence minister at the time.
In a trial relating to the same case that was concluded in December in Maputo, 11 of the 19 defendants were sentenced to prison (10 to 12 years), and three of them will have to pay compensation to the state equivalent to 2.6 billion euros.
The three targeted are Ndambi Guebuza, son of former president Armando Guebuza, and two former leaders of SISE, Gregório Leão and António Carlos do Rosário (former director-general and former leader of economic intelligence, respectively), who each received a 12-year prison sentence.
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