29 December 2007
Maputo — One of Mozambique's leading lawyers, Albano Silva, came under renewed attack on Thursday in the right-wing weekly paper "Zambeze" , which accused him of "trafficking in influence" to obtain contracts for a company in which he is a partner.
Silva owns 25 per cent of the company INAGRICO, which recently won a contract to supply equipment to the Mozambican Engineering Laboratory, a body which is subordinate to the Ministry of Public Works. INAGRICO will be paid 27.3 million meticais (about 1.15 million US dollars).
"Zambeze" journalist Alvarito de Carvalho, author of many previous articles hostile to Albano Silva, argued that INAGRICO should not have won the contract because it is supposedly on a "black list" of companies that owe money to the treasury.
The fact that INAGRICO did get the contract "is considered trafficking in influence", wrote Carvalho (the influence in question presumably being the fact that Silva is married to Mozambican Prime Minister Luisa Diogo).
We are not told precisely who considers the award of the contract to constitute trafficking in influence since, as is habitual in this type of "Zambeze" article, the sources hostile to Silva are all anonymous.
One of INAGRICO's rivals, whose bid was unsuccessful, supposedly complained "It is paradoxical that the Engineering Laboratory preferred to award a very valuable tender to a company that owes money to the Treasury".
We cannot check whether the company actually said that, since Carvalho does not bother to give us its name. This anonymous company went on to claim that there must have been "trafficking in influence" since INAGRICO "had never won a similar tender from the Mozambican state".
On that line of argument, any company that wins a contract for the first time must be suspect.
The only named source in the entire article is the head of the commission that awarded the contract, Manuel da Conceicao. His explanation for why INAGRICO had won was very simple - it had submitted the cheapest and best quality bid.
There was thus nothing strange about one company winning the contract for all the consignments of equipment. INAGRICO had met all the terms stipulated by the Engineering Laboratory including a bank guarantee of 2.5 per cent of the value of the bid.
But should a company owing money to the Treasury have been allowed to bid in the first place ? Is INAGRICO really on a "black list" ?
AIM phoned up Silva who declared that the last installment of the debt was paid off this month. In other words there is no debt. "We have fulfilled all our obligations", Silva declared.
Earlier this year, Silva told AIM that INAGRICO had stepped up its repayments from around 7,000 dollars a month to 10,000 dollars a month, with the intention of clearing the debt this year, which has now been achieved. The deadline was in 2008.
The treasury loans from which INAGRICO and several dozen other companies benefited were in fact foreign aid (mostly from Japan) which the beneficiaries were to repay to the Mozambican treasury. The loan to INAGRICO was for half a million dollars, but Silva says the company only used 406,000 dollars
This was not money that went into an INAGRICO account: the loan took the form of goods. INAGRICO had to provide the donor with a shopping list and tenders were arranged abroad to acquire the equipment (which is why, in the state accounts, the loan seems spread over three years).
"Zambeze" has never bothered to ask what the terms of the loan were. It seems to be under the impression that if you borrow half a million dollars, you have to pay it back the following week. The idea that loans have a repayment schedule over several years seems quite alien to Alvarito de Carvalho.
Business would soon come to a standstill if companies in debt could not bid for contracts. It is in the nature of a capitalist economy that companies are frequently in debt, usually to banks. As long as there are reasonable guarantees that the money will be repaid, nobody complains, least of all the banks, who can only survive thanks to the interest they charge on these loans.
"Zambeze"'s crusade against Albano Silva is a constant feature of the paper. Rarely a week goes by without an attack on Silva in its pages. In recent weeks this has merged with a second campaign, this time against the new Attorney-General, Augusto Paulino.
An attempt was made in August to stop Paulino's appointment by fabricating claims that he had stolen 300 million old meticais (about 12,000 US dollars), when he was presiding judge of the Maputo provincial court, to buy a flat. The allegation was dismissed as groundless, and made in bad faith, when it was investigated by the Higher Council of the Judicial Magistrature (CSMJ), the body that disciplines judges.
Nonetheless, "Zambeze"'s lead story for the past two issues is the absurd claim that Paulino is an embezzler.
For some people, Paulino and Silva are very inconvenient - for both of them made their names in the fight against organised crime. Paulino was the judge who, in January 2003, sentenced to long jail terms the six men found guilty of murdering the country's foremost investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso.
They included the men accused of masterminding the country's largest bank fraud, in which the equivalent of 14 million US dollars was stolen from the Commercial Bank of Mozambique (BCM) at the time of its privatization in 1996. Silva was the BCM's lawyer, and worked closely with Cardoso in trying to bring the gang that defrauded the bank - members of the Abdul Satar crime family, and their accomplice, BCM branch manager Vicente Ramaya - to judgment. That battle was eventually successful and the BCM trial was held in 2004.
This is the biggest - some might say the only - success so far in the fight against organised crime in Mozambique. Some of the Abdul Satar network are in jail, some have fled the country - and we can be sure that they are unlikely to have forgiven either Paulino or Silva.
So whose interests are really served by a spate of articles spreading disinformation about these two prominent and courageous figures in the Mozambican legal system ?
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Once again Mr. Paul Fauvet Has written something that is likely to be blindly believed by readers without alternative information on Mozambique. To this stage it seems to me that there is an hidden agenda. The weekly paper "Zambeze" is not the only papper writting about Albano/Paulino´s case. Why should Mr. Paul Fauvet come to allafrica "shooting" only the articles written by Zambeze? Why should all that Zambeze writes be considered desinformation by Mr. Paul Fauvet? Weeks ago there was a "very good" desinformation written by Gustavo Mavie, who is Mr. Paul Fauvet collegue working for AIM in Portugal. What… [Read Full Text]