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Mozambique: Disinformation On the Front Page

Paul Fauvet

17 December 2007

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Maputo — A shocking story splashed across the front page of the latest issue of the Maputo weekly "Zambeze": the country's new Attorney-General, Augusto Paulino, was, the paper claimed , the subject of a criminal investigation.

Inside the paper, page two was entirely devoted to the claim that Paulino is accused of stealing 300 million old meticais (about 12,500 US dollars) from the state. The article leads Zambeze readers to believe that Paulino used this money, supposedly stolen when he was presiding judge of the Maputo Provincial Court, to buy a house.

The source for the article is proceedings in the Supreme Court, where judge Joao Carlos Trindade had been appointed to investigate the case against Paulino. There was indeed such a case in August - but Trindade told AIM that neither the author of the article, Alvarito de Carvalho, nor anyone else on "Zambeze" had ever spoken to him.

And the article fails to give its readers the rather important detail that the charges against Paulino were dropped. Throughout the text, Carvalho seeks to give the impression that the case is ongoing and that President Armando Guebuza has appointed a man facing serious criminal charges as Attorney-General.

The allegations against Paulino were made immediately it became known that Guebuza wished to sack the former Attorney-General, Joaquim Madeira, and give Paulino the job. The timing certainly made it look as though the embezzlement charge was just a desperate move to stop Paulino becoming Attorney-General.

The matter first went to the Supreme Council of the Judicial Magistrature (CSMJ), the body responsible for disciplining judges, which set up a commission of inquiry. This investigated the allegation and found it entirely without merit. There was, in short, no evidence against Paulino.

But then the Attorney-General's office sent a formal criminal accusation against Paulino to the Supreme Court (the only court which can hear cases against senior judges). Somebody leaked a few select pieces from the hearings before Trindade to "Zambeze", and Carvalho obediently wrote them up.

The quotations in the "Zambeze" article come exclusively from Paulino's detractors. The evidence in his favour (including the fact that he contracted a bank loan to pay for his house) is omitted. So too, most shockingly, is the outcome.

Once Trindade's investigation was over, the prosecution dropped the charges. End of story.

For "Zambeze" to revive this case now, over three months later, is just a crude attempt to discredit Paulino. The article also includes the downright lie that, immediately after his appointment as Attorney-General, Paulino abolished the Central Office for the Fight Against Corruption (GCCC). In fact, even if he wanted to, Paulino could not abolish the GCCC, since it was established by law, and so can only be abolished by the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic.

What Paulino has done is try and make the GCCC work by stripping it of cases that do not fit the legal definition of corruption. He told a meeting of the Consultative Council of the Attorney-General's Office, held earlier this month, that the GCCC had to concentrate on its main task - so he had removed from the GCCC "cases of forgery, swindles, murders, and theft among others".

To date the GCCC has dashed the hopes of those who believed that it would be a useful instrument in the fight against corruption. Its investigations have not resulted in the prosecution of any serious act of corruption. It remains to be seen whether Paulino's insistence on a sharper focus will lead to better results.

This was not the first piece of disinformation "Zambeze" had carried against Paulino. On 8 November, the paper claimed that Paulino was illegally holding the posts of both Attorney-General and presiding judge of the Maputo City court, in violation of the principle that nobody can be a judge and a prosecutor at the same time.

The CSMJ was obliged to issue a statement denying the "Zambeze" story, pointing out that immediately on his appointment as Attorney-General Paulino ceased his duties as a judge, and for as long as he is Attorney-General his membership of the CSMJ itself is suspended.

Why should Paulino's rise spark resistance ? First, Paulino is one of the few judges who has struck a serious blow against organised crime in Mozambique. In January 2003, he sentenced to lengthy prison terms six men accused of the murder of investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso. They included two members of the notorious Abdul Satar crime family, and their accomplice, former bank manager Vicente Ramaya.

Ramaya and members of the Satar family were also accused of defrauding the country's largest bank the BCM of the equivalent of 14 million dollars in 1996. This case was kept out of the courts for years, thanks to substantial corruption in the Attorney-General's Office in the late 1990s.

Campaigns to bring the BCM fraud to trial and to get rid of the corrupt attorneys were led by the BCM's lawyer, Albano Silva, and in the media, by Carlos Cardoso. Gangsters failed to put a bullet through Albano Silva's head in an ambush in November 1999, but a year later they were more successful when they gunned down Cardoso.

Although he survived an attempt at physical assassination, Silva now has to tolerate character assassination almost every week in parts of the Mozambican media, notably in the pages of "Zambeze", and notably in articles written by Alvarito de Carvalho.

The BCM case did eventually come to trial in 2004, and Ramaya and Momad Assif Abdul Satar ("Nini") were both found guilty of defrauding the bank. Their counter-attack was that the BCM's own directors were responsible for the fraud and that Silva offered Ramaya a bribe of half a million dollars not to incriminate the directors. Although no serious evidence has been offered for these charges, this does not stop them reappearing over and over again, including in Carvalho's latest article.

Paulino and Silva inconvenienced a powerful mafia, which clearly still has some influence, although several of its leading members have fled abroad, or are in prison.

But not all the opposition to Paulino can be traced back to the Cardoso and BCM cases. His impending appointment shook up the cosy world of Madeira's reign at the Attorney-General's Office. Although Madeira was initially held in high regard, and had a reputation for honesty, his period in office did not live up to expectations.

Lethargy stepped in - sometimes on a scandalous scale. The best example is the second Cardoso murder case, in which the main accused was businessman Nyimpine Chissano, the oldest son of former President Joaquim Chissano. The case was opened in late 2002, and made no visible progress. Charges were brought against Chissano Jr in 2006, but it was not clear what evidence prosecutors had. There was no sign of any trial impending when Nyimpine Chissano died of a heart attack last month. The slothfulness, negligence or worse of Madeira's office meant that Chissano never had the chance to clear his name, and Mozambican society could never learn whether there really was a case against him.

Likewise with the collapse of the second privatized bank, Austral, in 2001 and the murder of the man sent in by the central bank to clean up the mess, Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua. No one has been arrested for this murder, and despite a forensic audit of Austral, there have been no arrests for a collapse obviously provoked by a wave of reckless lending. Financial earthquakes are not like natural ones - usually individuals are responsible for them, but in the Mozambican case they have enjoyed impunity.

On the "cui bono" principle, the attempt to prevent Guebuza from appointing Paulino seems likely to have come from within Madeira's office. Certainly it is likely to have been a senior prosecutor who leaked selected details of the case to "Zambeze". But the paper cannot claim innocence: by refusing to reveal the outcome of the case, it became an active party to the attempt to smear and discredit Paulino.

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