25 April 2008
Maputo — The widow of murdered Mozambican economist Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua on Friday appealed to the government and its foreign partners to keep the question of her husband's assassination on the agenda of their policy dialogue.
Siba-Siba's death was intimately linked to the looting of the privatized Austral Bank in the late 1990s. Austral used to be the state-owned People's Development Bank (BPD). In 1997, under pressure from the World Bank and the IMF to pull out of commercial banking, the government sold 60 per cent of the BPD to a Malaysian/Mozambican consortium.
A new board was set up, with former Industry Minister Octavio Muthemba as its chair. The bank changed its name and set about granting loans recklessly. By April 2001, Austral was so burdened with bad loans that it was on the brink of collapse. The consortium refused to recapitalize the bank - instead it handed its shares in Austral over to the central bank, and the Malaysian partners fled the country.
The Bank of Mozambique appointed Siba-Siba, who was then the head of its banking supervision department, as head of an interim board of directors to sort out the mess at Austral. Siba-Siba's main tasks were to ascertain the true financial situation of Austral and prepare the bank for a second privatization.
Siba-Siba set up a vigorous loan recovery programme. He was prepared to renegotiate loan payments - but threatened to use the courts against those who did not pay. In June 2001, he even published a list of hundreds of debtors in the main daily paper "Noticias".
On 11 August 2001, Siba-Siba's lifeless body was found at the bottom of the stairwell at the Bank's Maputo headquarters. South African forensic experts confirmed that Siba-Siba had been murdered. Unidentified assailants seem to have surprised Siba-Siba in his top floor office, killed him, and hurled the body down the stairwell.
Almost seven years have passed, and despite repeated promises from the authorities that the case will be thoroughly investigated, nobody has been arrested in connection with the murder. Nor has anybody faced trial on any charges related to the looting of Austral.
On Friday, Siba-Siba's widow, Aquina Manjate, took out a half page advert in "Noticias", to appeal to the government and the donors to put the murder on their agenda.
Manjate points out that the cost of fraud and bad loans to Austral was in the region of 150 million US dollars. But the only step taken in the case so far was a forensic audit of Austral in 2005, and even that, Manjate says, was only achieved because of pressure on the government from the group of donors who provide aid directly to the state budget.
That audit has never been published, and it has not led to anyone being charged with fraud or malfeasance.
Manjate says that Siba-Siba's family, and the Mozambican public, "are still waiting for justice to be done". From what she has learnt, the forensic audit "provided important data for bringing criminal charges in relation to the ruinous management of the bank, and clues that could lead to solving the crime".
"But the investigation is happening at a very slow pace - if indeed, any investigation at all is taking place", she added.
Manjate noted that in September 2006, the government and donors set up a high level joint working group to discuss the next steps. "But the concerns of the government and the donors are only to do with recovering the non-performing loans", she said. "They completely ignore the investigation into the murder".
Currently the government and the group of 19 donors who give direct budget support are involved in their annual review of performance. "As part of this joint review, the government and the donors exchange information on the levels of loan recovery, but the central question - that of the murder - has been put aside", accused Manjate.
The Joint Review is scheduled to end on 30 April, and the government and donors are meeting this Friday for "Political Dialogue" on sensitive matters concerning budget support. "The government has given the donors information on the stage reached in loan recovery", said Manjate. "But there has been no information on the course of the investigation into the murder".
"This silence is repugnant", she declares. "As time passes, the possible clues to discovering who committed this appalling crime are disappearing. We think it is urgent that this political dialogue includes the question of the murder. The Austral Bank case is not just about money".
Pf/ (762)
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