Maputo — The chairperson of Mozambique Airlines (LAM), Jose Viegas, told the Maputo City Court on Thursday that Diodino Cambaza, the former chairperson of the Mozambican Airport Company (ADM), had refused to tell him about the problems of the company that led to his arrest.

Cambaza and four others are standing for allegedly defrauding ADM of the equivalent of two million US dollars.

Called to the witness stand, Viegas said that when the case began to be spoken of in the press, but before Cambaza was detained, he went to speak to him to hear his side of the story. Viegas had "a good impression" of Cambaza, but when he raised the press allegations against him, Cambaza clammed up.

"He wasn't open with me", Viegas said. "He just said it was a conspiracy against him inside the company".

LAM and ADM are the sole two shareholders in the catering company SMS (Mozambique Services Company). But Viegas said he had never tried to interfere in the running of SMS, since SMS had its own company structures.

This contrasts with the approach of Cambaza. According to the prosecution, Cambaza used SMS as a conduit through which money was channeled from ADM for illicit loans.

Since none of SMS's own money disappeared in these operations, LAM did not realise what was going on, Viegas said.

Furthermore, the SMS chairperson, Maria Joao Coito, who also sat on the ADM board, deliberately kept LAM in the dark.

After Cambaza's arrest, Viegas attended an SMS general meeting which wanted to know why SMS had become involved in the scandal. It turned out that company decisions had not been written down, and that Coito had refused to sign certain minutes of the SMS board

At the general meeting, he recalled, Coito had refused to give any details about the illicit orders SMS had received from Cambaza, "We felt uncomfortable with the position and behaviour of Maria Coito", he said.

As for SMS managing director Deolinda Matos, one of Cambaza's co-accused, Viegas said that she had worked as financial manager of LAM in the 1990s. Because of her honesty, he said, she was appointed manager of LAM internal audits, and than managing director of SMS.

Matos was accused of complicity in the thefts because she did not resist Cambaza when he used the SMS accounts. She admitted in her own testimony that she just followed the orders she received from Cambaza.

That was why an SMS cheque of 25,000 dollars was issued, supposedly to pay for expenses of the ruling Frelimo Party, but in reality to buy a property for Cambaza from a man named Joseldo Massango.

SMS funds were also used to pay an illicit salary, first of 1,100 and later 1,750 dollars a month, to Antonio Bulande, head of the office of Transport Minister Antonio Munguambe. Munguambe was recruited to the fictitious post of legal adviser to SMS. Nobody in SMS had asked for this post to be created, since SMS already had a contract with a law firm providing it with legal services.