Maputo — Prominent lawyer Albano Silva on Monday denied claims that he had intimidated or threatened former bank manager Vicente Ramaya, one of those charged with ordering the murder of Mozambique's top investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso.

When the murder trial reopened after a two week adjournment over the Xmas and New Year holiday period, the prosecution called Silva to reply to allegations made by Ramaya.

The prosecution argues that Ramaya, and the brothers Ayob and Momade Abdul Satar, ordered the assassination because of Cardoso's articles on the 1996 fraud in what was then the country's largest bank, the BCM, in which Ramaya and members of the Abdul Satar family were the main suspects.

When he was interrogated in November, Ramaya tried to shift the blame for the fraud onto members of the BCM board of directors. He also claimed that Silva, who was the lawyer for the BCM, had threatened him so that he would not mention the names of any BCM director during the investigations.

Silva described Ramaya's claims as "absolutely untrue". He pointed out that he had only been hired by the BCM in September 1996, by which time Ramaya had already been suspended from his job as manager of the BCM branch in the Maputo suburb of Sommerschield where the fraud had taken place.

When Ramaya was questioned by the bank's own inspectors, Silva did not take part. In those early interviews, Silva recalled, Ramaya "behaved in an arrogant fashion, and said he had nothing to do with the fraud".

He noted that Ramaya first tried to blame the BCM board of directors in a 1997 newspaper interview, but in the legal investigations of that year "he had every opportunity to provide evidence against the directors, but he produced nothing".

As the BCM's lawyer, "I would accuse any person against whom I had proof", said Silva. "My principles do not allow me to protect anyone. But the fraud happened in Ramaya's branch, and Ramaya was trying to direct the investigations away from the place where the fraud happened".

Not only did he never threaten Ramaya - during the 1997 investigations, Silva was not even able to question him, "because he refused to answer any of my questions, arguing that the bank had no right to appoint a lawyer to represent it during the investigation".

Silva also denied visiting the top security prison in 2000 to persuade a key prosecution witness, Osvaldo Muianga ("Dudu"), to alter his statement so as to incriminate Ramaya and the Satars in the murder of Cardoso. "I never went to the prison to speak to Dudu. I've never used such methods", he said.

He noted that another criminal associate of the Satars, Paulo Estevao ("Dangerman") "asked me to come to the prison and negotiate with him, and I refused. I told him if he had anything to negotiate, he should talk to the judge".

(Estevao is one of those accused of the attempt on Silva's life in November 1999. He is also a bodyguard of Momade Assife Satar.) "I didn't visit the prison in this period at all, to speak to Dudu or to anyone else", stressed Silva.

Asked about relations between Ramaya, the Satar brothers, and the attorneys who were handling the BCM case, Silva accused the attorneys (notably Diamantino dos Santos, currently a fugitive for whom an arrest warrant was issued in early 2002) of working with those suspected of masterminding the fraud so that the case could never come to court.

"They sabotaged the case file, they hid evidence, they were creating conditions for impunity", said Silva. "The result was that in 1999, there was really no case at all. It was just a heap of rubbish that was sent to the court. The papers had no order, no logic, the pages were all disorganised, the most important documents were missing. No judge in the world could accept this".

Silva argued that Ramaya and the Satars had worked with corrupt attorneys to ensure that the case would be in no condition to go to trial.

Under normal circumstances, the BCM case should have come to trial in 1998. Instead "it was stopped, and the attorneys took no notice of any of the requests made by the bank", said Silva.

Ramaya visited the attorneys involved regularly, and Silva discovered that Ramaya was given photocopies of everything in the case file, including all the bank's requests.

Silva listed irregularities committed during the investigation. "Ramaya collaborated with Diamantino dos Santos in order to direct the investigation away from the Sommerschield branch", he said. "In February 1997, he gave Diamantino a list of documents to be demanded from the BCM, to do with other branches, not his branch".

Diamantino interrupted an interrogation of one of the bank's directors to accept this list from Ramaya, and demanded that the bank produce the documents at once. It did so, but in 1998 the attorneys "sent all the documents back, because they were useless", said Silva.

Even worse, when Diamantino dos Santos interrogated one bank worker, Ramaya, despite being one of the main accused, took part in the questioning.

The defence lawyers repeatedly tried to stop Silva from speaking. Initially, they denied that the prosecution had any right to call him at all, on the grounds that the BCM fraud is a quite separate case from the Carlos Cardoso murder.

"These are questions that should not be dealt with by this court", declared Ramaya's lawyer, Abdul Gani. He wanted to erect a barrier between the Cardoso murder, and anything to do with the BCM fraud or the attempt on Silva's life.

Prosecuting attorney Mourao Baluce retorted "All the questions you say shouldn't be raised here were in fact first raised by your client".

It was Ramaya who had made a series of allegations in open court against Albano Silva, and if Gani had allowed his client to make these claims, he could hardly complain when the prosecution called on Silva to rebut them.

Judge Augusto Paulino agreed. "The prosecution believes it has the right to contradict what Ramaya said", he pointed out.

"It was Ramaya who said that Albano Silva threatened him - it's all in the court minutes".

Domingos Arouca, the lawyer for Ayob Satar, claimed "the deep animosity between Albano Silva and Vicente Ramaya and the Satar family is well known. So for ethical reasons, he should not testify".

Paulino ruled against Arouca, noting that he had not raised this objection when the prosecution first announced, in December, that it would call Silva. Throughout Silva's evidence, Gani made objections, interrupting to claim that Silva was producing, not facts, but "value judgements" and "speculation".

At one point, Paulino admitted there were "excesses" in some of Silva's replies to question, "but this is understandable given that he has suffered an assassination attempt. This is something that will mark him for the rest of his life".