Southern Africa: Ex-Mozambican Finance Minister Manuel Chang Must Be Extradited to US, Rules Concourt

Ryan Rayburn / IMF, Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Manuel Chang, Minister of Finance of Mozambique, gives a statement to the media during the African Financial Ministers Press Briefing at IMF Headquarters during the 2014 IMF Spring Meetings in Washington, D.C.
24 May 2023
Daily Maverick (Johannesburg)
analysis By Peter Fabricius

The Constitutional Court has dismissed Mozambique's leave to appeal against Chang's extradition to the US. Nothing now seems to stand in the way of the former finance minister being sent to New York to face fraud and corruption charges.

The Constitutional Court has refused the Mozambique government leave to appeal against the high court's decision to extradite its former finance minister Manuel Chang to the United States to face corruption charges. The court's decision appears to have cleared the way for Chang to be transferred to the US, after spending more than four years in a South African prison.

This was the fourth unsuccessful attempt by Mozambique to get leave to appeal against the Johannesburg High Court judgment of November 2021 that Chang should be extradited to the US. Judge Margaret Victor overturned Justice Minister Ronald Lamola's order in August of that year that Chang should be extradited to Mozambique.

Lawyers believe Mozambique and Chang himself have now exhausted their legal remedies to avoid his being sent to the US to face charges including corruption for his complicity in a fraudulent scheme to borrow $2-billion from foreign banks to buy tuna fishing boats and patrol vessels in 2013 and 2014.

The Constitutional Court had once before refused Mozambique leave to appeal, and so had the Supreme Court of Appeal and the Johannesburg High Court which originally ordered his extradition to the US.

In 2019, the high court also...

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