allAfrica.com: Mozambique: Supreme Court Clears Attorney-General's Name (Page 1 of 2)

Mozambique's Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out the case in which Attorney-General Augusto Paulino had been accused of stealing 300,000 meticais (about 12,450 US dollars) of state funds.

This is the fourth time that senior legal figures have found that the claims made against Paulino have no basis in fact. In August last year, the Higher Council of the Judicial Magistrature (CSMJ), the disciplinary body for judges, heard the complaint, and found there was no evidence of any wrongdoing by Paulino.

Undeterred, Paulino's enemies in the Public Prosecutor's Office laid a charge against him before the Supreme Court, in a flagrant attempt to prevent Paulino's appointment as Attorney-General.

The Supreme Court judge in charge of the investigation, Joao Trindade, called witnesses, and he too concluded that there was no evidence that any crime had been committed. As Mozambican legal procedures demand, he sent the case back to the Public Prosecutor's Office - and an Assistant Attorney-General, Erasmo Nhavoto, issued a dispatch declining to press charges.

When Supreme Court judges Luis Mondlane and Jose Norberto Carrilho met on Tuesday, their task was not to put Paulino on trial, but merely to decide whether they agreed with Nhavoto's dispatch.

And they did. The ruling from the two judges, a copy of which AIM obtained on Thursday, ordered the shelving of the case because there was no sign that any crime at all had been committed.

The records of Trindade's investigation did not provide any evidence of any criminal act, and so the Supreme Court simply accepted Nhavoto's dispatch.

This happened on Tuesday. Yet on Thursday, the right wing weekly "Zambeze", which has been running a libelous campaign against Paulino since mid-December, claimed on its front page that Paulino was "in the dock", and that the Supreme Court was putting the Attorney-General on trial.

But there could be no trial, because all charges against Paulino had been dropped months ago. It made no sense to describe Paulino as an accused person, when there was no longer any charge sheet. There was no dock either, and Paulino was not in it: there was no need for him to be physically present when Mondlane and Carrilho pored over Nhavoto's dispatch and the work done by Trindade.

The campaign against Paulino arose from a denunciation against Paulino made by Adelaide Muchanga, a clerk in the Maputo Provincial Court, referring to events that had supposedly happened when Paulino was the presiding judge of that court. Muchanga made the denunciation to Isabel Rupia, who at the time was one of the assistant attorney-generals, on 28 November 2006.

Yet Rupia did not act on the denunciation for months - it was only sent to the CSMJ on 19 June 2007. This was grossly irregular. According to legal sources contacted by AIM, on receiving such a serious allegation against a senior judge, Rupia's proper course of action was to contact immediately either the Maputo provincial branch of the public prosecutor's office, or the Supreme Court.

Instead, the denunciation sat in a drawer for over six months. Forwarding it to the CSMJ in June 2007 looks like a clear attempt to obstruct Paulino's appointment as Attorney-General.

Muchanga claimed that Paulino had ordered her to withdraw 300,000 meticais of the court's money which he needed for personal purposes, and that he never returned the money. But the Supreme Court found that, although this money was indeed withdrawn by Muchanga, it was to meet urgent expenses of the court itself and had nothing to do with Paulino.

Muchanga had claimed that Paulino used the money to buy a flat. However, the price of the flat that Pauilino purchased from a man named Cristovao Mueio, was 250,000 meticais, and there was documentary evidence that he had paid for it with a perfectly legal bank transfer of 210,000 meticais, and a promise to pay the rest when Muio obtained the title deeds to the flat.

The Supreme Court found that Muchanga herself had cashed the cheque for 300,000 meticais at a bank, and had not handed any of it on to Paulino. In fact, Paulino had censured her for carrying on her person such a large amount of cash, in violation of the normal rules for handling state funds (this was a detail that Muchanga omitted in her initial denunciation).

So the 300,000 meticais was never stolen, and Paulino never laid his hands on it. In short, there was no crime.

A second claim by Muchanga was that Paulino had ordered the payment of 112,000 meticais without the necessary documents to justify such expenditure (invoices and receipts). This money was paid to a certain Emilia Filipe who ran the canteen at the Maputo provincial court.

The Supreme Court found that this money paid off part of a debt accumulated with the canteen for the supply of meals to drivers, security guards, cleaners and other court staff. The expenditure was entirely legitimate and Muchanga "at no time showed that Paulino gave orders to make payments without justifying documents", stated the ruling by Mondlane and Carrilho.

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