Paul Fauvet
31 January 2008
Maputo — One of Mozambique's most prominent lawyers, Albano Silva, has finally hit back against the barrage of libelous accusations against him published repeatedly by the right-wing Maputo weekly, "Zambeze".
Using the right of reply clauses in the Mozambican press law, Silva obliged "Zambeze" to print a lengthy letter in its latest edition in which he vigorously defends himself against claims that he offered a bribe to Vicente Ramaya, the branch manager at the heart of the country's largest bank fraud..
In 1996, as the country's largest bank, the BCM, was being privatized, the equivalent of 14 million US dollars was drained from the bank via fraudulent accounts opened by members of the Abdul Satar crime family in the BCM branch run by Ramaya, in the plush Maputo suburb of Sommerschield.
Silva, as the BCM's lawyer, played a prominent role in bringing the fraudsters to trial. This was at considerable personal risk - Silva narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in November 1999. A year later, the country's top investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, who had exposed the BCM fraud in his paper "Metical", and was campaigning for the case to come to trial, was gunned down a few hundred metres from his office.
Having failed to eliminate Silva physically, Ramaya and his associates set about assassinating his character, and fabricated the story that, during the initial investigation into the fraud, in September 1996, Silva had offered Ramaya a bribe of half a million dollars.
Ramaya was anxious to shift the blame for the fraud onto members of the BCM board of directors. The claim was that Silva was covering up for the directors, and offered Ramaya the bribe to suppress evidence that the directors were involved.
But all those who repeat this tired story have failed to go back to the BCM trial (held from December 2003 to March 2004) . For Ramaya claimed that the bribe offer was witnessed by Jeremias Mizela, the BCM's manager of audits and inspection. But when Mizela gave evidence he categorically denied Ramaya's story.
He recalled just one occasion on which both Ramaya and Silva had been in his office. "Ramaya was called to my office and Albano Silva asked him if he was prepared to denounce the others involved, or preferred to take sole responsibility for the money the bank had lost", Mizela said.
Ramaya's response was to start insulting Silva, "and so I suspended the meeting. I firmly deny that Silva offered Ramaya a half million dollar bribe - not in my office, and not in my presence, at any rate".
Thus there was no evidence of the alleged bribe, other than the unsupported word of Vicente Ramaya (who by 2004 was already serving a sentence for ordering the murder of Carlos Cardoso). Despite this, Isabel Rupia, the then head of the anti-corruption unit in the Attorney-General's Office, started proceedings against Silva in January 2004.
In his letter to "Zambeze", Silva points out that this case never led to any charges against him, and Rupia's investigations ended in mid-2004. The usual procedure when an investigation produces no evidence is to close the case.
Instead, writes Silva, "this case has been kept open to the present, just to make it possible to refer to me eternally as someone involved in corruption and bribery. This case has been used as an instrument for the public assassination of my character, It should have been shelved long ago, and those responsible for the malicious denunciation should have been sued".
He warns the "Zambeze" management "I cannot continue to tolerate being treated by your paper as a criminal, involved in bribery or attempted bribery and the deviation of documents. I have never been charged, much less tried and sentenced. I took part in the prosecution of the BCM case. It wasn't me who defrauded the bank or who ordered the murder of Carlos Cardoso".
Silva points out that in a few months some of those involved in the BCM fraud will face the courts again - this time in the long delayed trial of those accused of the 1999 assassination attempt.
Rupia's case against Silva was based exclusively on claims made by Ramaya and by the defence lawyers for the BCM accused. But these claims fell to pieces during the trial itself. It had been shown that the supposed bribe was "impossible". Criminal investigations, notes Silva ironically, are supposed to look into "facts which happened, and not things which could never have happened".
The attempts of the defence lawyers to knife Silva could not be taken seriously - for when they appealed against the verdict and sentence in the BCM case they did not so much as mention the supposed bribe offered by Silva.
Silva noted that if they really believed in the accusations made against Silva during the trial, then they would have used these in the appeal. For if there was any truth in claims that the BCM's lawyer had been offering bribes and hiding documents, then they would have been powerful weapons for the defendants, and could have led to the verdict and sentences being declared null and void.
Towards the end of his letter, Silva broadens his attack to cover former Attorney-General Joaquim Madeira, and the former head of the Central Office Against Corruption (GCCC - the successor body to Rupia's anti-corruption unit), Rafael Sebastiao. Madeira, Rupia and Sebastiao had allowed cases to be pursued without the slightest chance of leading to charges, purely for purposes of harassment and character assassination. He suggested that these three senior prosecutors had been motivated by "petty instincts of revenge, envy or probably racism". (Silva is a white Mozambican, the three prosecutors are black).
Silva hopes that "Zambeze" will "once and for all end libelous references". This hope has been immediately dashed, since in his introduction to the letter, "Zambeze" journalist Alvarito de Carvalho (author of most of the previous attacks against Silva) accuses Silva of the "illicit movement" of money from the BCM, and of bribing a police inspector so that documents proving the involvement of members of the board of directors in the fraud would disappear.
Carvalho does not offer anything so mundane as evidence for these accusations. Clearly he hopes that we have all forgotten the BCM trial itself in which Ramaya singularly failed to prove involvement of any of the BCM directors. Fatally for his own defence, Ramaya was unable to produce an internally coherent story.
Thus in January 2004 Ramaya claimed that he had allowed fraudulent cheques to be credited to the Abdul Satar accounts, because he had received instructions to that effect from Alberto da Costa Calu of the BCM board. But in February he said that he had not intervened to credit the cheques at all - instead they passed through a computer programme that had been deliberately corrupted by the South African company that installed the computers.
These two versions are incompatible, as the judge in the case noted at the time. Such considerations do not prevent "Zambeze" from regarding Ramaya as a reliable source in the paper's relentless campaign to denigrate Albano Silva.
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