Southern Africa: FBI Officials Kept Waiting As Red Tape Delays Manuel Chang's Deportation to the U.S

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.
10 July 2023
Daily Maverick (Johannesburg)
analysis By Peter Fabricius

The former Mozambican finance minister is now expected to be flown to the US on Tuesday, 11 July.

Unexplained bureaucratic glitches on Monday postponed South Africa's surrender of former Mozambican finance minister Manuel Chang to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to be flown to the US to stand trial for fraud and corruption.

A jet which brought FBI officials to collect Chang from SA authorities sat at Lanseria airport all day while officials tried to untangle red tape, official sources said. They said the jet, with Chang on board, was likely to take off on Tuesday.

Chang has been incarcerated in South Africa for more than four years since being arrested at OR Tambo International Airport on 27 December 2018 on a US extradition request.

Legal efforts to prevent his extradition to the US ran out in May this year when the Constitutional Court dismissed the second application by the Mozambican government for leave to appeal against the Johannesburg High Court's judgment of November 2021 that Chang should be extradited to the US and not Mozambique, as SA Justice Minister Ronald Lamola had ordered in August 2021.

Daily Maverick could not establish the precise cause of the delay on Monday, but officials were confident it would be resolved in time for Chang to be handed over...

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