9 December 2008
Maputo — Three former employees of the Austral Bank (now renamed as Barclays-Mozambique) have been arrested in connection with the murder, in August 2001, of the interim chairman of the bank, Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua.
Georgina Zandamela, press attache to Attorney-General Augusto Paulino, confirmed the detentions to AIM on Tuesday, but declined to reveal the names of those arrested.
Austral was initially the state-owned People's Development Bank (BPD). Under pressure from the World Bank and the IMF, the government privatised the BPD in 1997, and a Malaysian-Mozambican consortium, headed by the Malaysian Southern Bank Berhard (SBB), bought 60 per cent of the shares.
The bank was renamed Austral, and, under the chairmanship of former Industry Minister Octavio Muthemba, embarked on a wave of reckless lending. By early 2001 Austral was collapsing under a huge weight of non-performing loans. Rather than recapitalize the bank, the consortium simply handed their shares back to the Mozambican state, and the Malaysians left the country.
The Bank of Mozambique appointed an interim board of directors, led by Siba-Siba, who was the head of the central bank's banking supervision department. His task was to ascertain the true financial state of the bank, and prepare it for a second privatization.
Siba-Siba embarked on a vigorous debt recovery programme, but on 11 August 2001 his lifeless body was found at the bottom of the stairwell at Austral headquarters.
Investigations into the murder were lethargic, and the case seemed to be going nowhere before the appointment of Paulino as Attorney-General in August 2007. Paulino made the Siba-Siba case a priority, and put a team of prosecutors on it full time.
In July, prosecutors interrogated at length four former directors of Austral - Muthemba, Jamu Hassane and Alvaro Massinga (from the days of the Mozambican-Malaysian consortium), and Parente Junior, who was a member of the interim board established by the central bank.
All have denied involvement in the murder.
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