14 October 2008
The Mozambican Attorney-General's Office has asked the General Inspectorate of Finance to speed up its audit of the publicly owned airports company, ADM, following extremely serious accusations of corruption leveled against the chairperson of the ADM board, Diodino Cambaza.
The Central Office for the Fight Against Corruption (GCCC), which operates out of the Attorney-General's Office, took an interest in the denunciations of Cambaza's activities, published in the weekly paper "Scorpiao".
The GCCC requested the audit, and is now anxious to see the results. Cited in Tuesday's issue of the Maputo daily "Noticias", a spokesperson for the Attorney-General's Office said the audit is intended to ascertain whether there have indeed been acts of corruption or other crimes committed by ADM officials. "Only after this can it be decided whether legal action should be taken", said the spokesperson.
Among the claims made by "Scorpiao" were that Cambaza exclusively handled two ADM bank accounts, and that he bought a house in central Maputo for a million US dollars - only to find that he could not register it definitively in his name because its previous owner, Humberto Monteiro, had mortgaged it to the Austral Bank (now Barclays Bank-Mozambique) as guarantee for a loan of 2.5 billion old meticais.
That sum was equivalent to about 103,000 dollars, and was to be paid over 15 years at an interest rate of 18 per cent a year. In order to obtain definitive title to the house, Cambaza immediately paid off Monteiro's loan, including all the interest, "Scorpiao" claimed.
Money from ADM's funds is also alleged to have been used in rehabilitating the homes of ADM directors, in purchasing vehicles, some of which have subsequently disappeared, and in acquiring luxury homes in South Africa, for the children of some of the top ADM staff who are studying in that country.
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