Banco Austral head Siba Siba Macuacua was thrown down the stairwell of his 15-storey bank headquarters on Av 25 de Setembro in Maputo 23 years ago, in an attempt to cover up an IMF-imposed corrupt privatisation of the bank. Prosecution of the assassins was repeatedly obstructed, and finally stopped in 2009. The attorney general appealed, but the appeal was never heard.
Unexpectedly, and without warning, on 12 September the Appeals Court rejected the ruling of 15 years ago. The Court formally changed Benigno da Silva Parente Júnior, at the time number two in the bank, and two security guards, Jose Fogueiro Jaime Passaje and Carlos Vasco Sitoe, with the murder.
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Banco Austral headquarters, now closed. Siba Siba's office was on the top floor.
The late 1990s were a period in which the IMF was imposing the free market. Several audits shows that BPD, the People's Development Bank, was well run. But it was state-owned so had to be privatised, and the IMF said if it was not privatised by 30 June 1997, all aid to Mozambique would be stopped. Two senior Frelimo people put together a company called Invester to take the bank, but it needed a real bank as partner. President Joaquim Chissano made a state visit to Malaysia in March 1997 with two Invester owners and Chissano's son Nyimpini. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir agreed to provide a partner for Invester, Southern Bank Berhad (SBB). And the new joint group took the bank just two days before the deadline. It was renamed Banco Austral - Southern Bank in Portuguese.
A KPMG audit on 15 January 2001 showed that management had looted the bank of more than $40mn in three years. The bank was simply given back to the Mozambican government in April 2001. It was expected that the government would cover up the fraud. Instead Bank of Mozambique (BdM) governor Adriano Maleiane (now Prime Minister) decided to clean up Banco Austral and publish lists of bad debtors. On 3 April 2001 BdM took over the bank and António Siba-Siba Macuacua, highly respected economist and BdM head of banking supervision, was named head of the bank. When it became clear that bad debts to the Frelimo elite would become known, on 11 August 2001 Siba Siba was thrown down the stairwell.
On 14 January 2009 the Attorney General's Office made clear it was not going to pursue the organisers of the assassination, and issued an "abstention notice" saying 21 people, mainly senior figures in Frelimo linked to the bank, would no longer be considered suspects. On the same day, the three people now charged were named as suspects by the Attorney General. To be formally charged, this had to be approved by a judge, and, unexpectedly, on 22 May 2009, judge Paulo Ricardo Cinco Reis threw out the case. The Attorney General's office appealed, but in an unprecedented action, the appeals court never heard the case - until last month.
But in a brave statement, Reis also said "The death of António Siba Siba Macuacua must be related to the big debtors of Banco Austral at the time [and] it was the wish of the big debtors that their names should not be published in the newspaper, nor that they should end up in court for coercive collection". Yet, these are the people the Attorney General said they would not charge.
Judge Reis also pointed to Nyimpine Chissano, who was working for the bank and had already been named by the judge in the Carlos Cardoso murder case. By the time of Reis statement, Nyimpine had died of a heart attack in 2007.
It was clear that the IMF and the international community saw the murder and looting as collateral damage of the move to the free market, and did not want it investigated. Just two months after the murder of Siba-Siba and less than a year after Mozambique's most important investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, had been gunned down, the donor Consultative Group met in Maputo in October 2001. Far from criticising the government for not looking for those who ordered the killings, donors rewarded Mozambique was $122mn more than it had asked for. Such donor generosity was almost unprecedented. Former security minister Sergio Vieira wrote in his Sunday newspaper column that this was a reward by the international community for "the good performance of the government" and that this "overrides the bank scandal and the assassinations of Siba Siba Macuacua and Carlos Cardoso".
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And for the next 23 years government and donors observed an informally agree silence. Suddenly someone brave within the appeals court broke the silence, and there will be a trial. And an obvious defence will be to follow Judge Reis's line and for the defendants to argue they were paid to kill Siba Siba by someone at the top.
