In all somewhere between 200 and 400 million dollars was stolen from the bank.
The treasury at the time was paying out a lot of money to bail out these banks and people were you know saying you know what are we paying. Who are the people who got this moneys you know somebody stole these monies.
…… society is the judicial system ………..
Mozambique 2004. Organised crime and corruption has become an embarrassment to the government of Felimo. Huge amounts of money have been stolen from the banks. The questions people are asking is, who stole this money and how did they get away with it.
We don’t have a judicial system. They can come to defend and enforce the interest of the poorest of the land.
And so that’s why you see here there are no prosecutions and that the elite feel free to manipulate state institutions to ensure their ability to steal substantial amounts of money.
DIALOGUE
To tackle the problem of organised crime, an anti corruption bill has recently been passed by parliament. And to help enforce it, an anti corruption unit has been formed. Isabel Rupea, Head of this unit has a difficult task ahead.
…… unit was established last year ….. doctor this is like the war for liberation
As a new wave of law students celebrate their graduation, they’re addressed by Judge ???? a senior judge known for campaigning to reform the legal system.
In Mozambique some magistrates, judges and prosecutors have been threatened and the environment among the judges and prosecutors is not very, very safe in that way.
…. Who was assassinated …… female judge who was murdered…… you never see examples of punishment
This falls into the overall pattern of clinic economic development in the country you have a number of very important families in Felimo. Five or six in my count. They have preference in business deals that involve state money – state funds or concessionary ??? from outside. They have a lot of influence in the use of donor money and this has probably been the pattern of ??? development throughout history and this is where we are at.
The murder of renowned investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso in November 2000 quickly drew international attention to the state of lawlessness in the country. At the time of his death, Cardoso was investigating large-scale bank fraud, and had received warnings not to continue.
I think that Carlos through his word became a very powerful man and a too powerful man in Mozambique. He was not afraid. He was not afraid of denouncing things that he saw were wrong in Mozambique in the society.
He was a journalist who investigated things and wouldn’t shut up. He was pursuing wherever they led and people who were inconvenienced by his investigations knew the only way to shut him up was to murder him.
There were two state owned banks. Bank of Commercial and the Bank of ????? which was later renamed Banco Austral. And in the mid 1990’s the world bank and the IMF insisted that those two banks be privatised.
Even before privatisation the banking sector was already experiencing serious problems with fraud. Corrupt businessmen had deposited millions of dollars worth of fraudulent cheques into Banco Austral. Money that did not exist that was later withdrawn as cash.
No one honest wanted those two Mozambican banks and the only people who would take them in both cases were a consortium of a corrupt foreign partner and corrupt members of the Mozambican elite who came together to make a bid.
The Felimo of Samora Michael had been intolerant of dishonesty amongst officials and people in power.
This was a socialist country with a lot of discipline within the leadership ranks for certain wrong doings if it would be some petty theft you would be punished.
DIALOGUE
When Mozambique gained independence from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975 the apartheid regime in South Africa along with the United States Government financed a civil war that would prevent Felimo from building a fair society for ordinary Mozambicans.
In 1986 Samora Michael died in a mysterious plane crash.
As the war with South Africa got worse the destruction here got really massive. Perhaps a 3rd of the population was displaced a million people died in this war and Mozambique became increasingly dependent on foreign assistance and foreign loans. Literally millions of dollars were flown in to keep Mozambique alive.
Civil war forced Mozambique to open its investment. Two things became imperative to engage this help. A United Nations led peace plan that would end the war. And the selling of state owned industry and services.
By the early 1990’s Cardoso had become an open critic of government economic policy.
It was not necessarily the politics of Felimo, the official politics of Felimo, which he continued to agree with. It was more that ehm, there were things that were developing that were not good for the society.
It endangered democracy itself I mean. If a parliament is not allowed to make decisions, if a governor if a country is not allowed to make the parliamentary decisions of governing the society obviously ????. Our democracy doesn’t mean anything. If we take a decision the government doesn’t like it. We cannot uphold our decisions. What does democracy mean, ehm, in a country that cannot make its own economic policy.
People got the impression that capitalism and market economy is something that has to do with who steals better and who steals faster.
There are really two kinds of corruption here. There is petty corruption at the level of officials and nurses and so on and there’s grand corruption at the level of the elite. And they have different routes. The petty corruption really originated in the early 1990’s when the IMF in its wisdom decided that Mozambican civil servants would work harder if they were paid wages that were below the poverty line.
One of the problems is that corruption is getting endemic its becoming a system. For example you need to send your kid to school but your kid doesn’t get in easily so you need to bribe someone in a school. So if you are a policeman you need to get the money from the drivers in the street to go to have your kids in school. Again if you are a nurse in a hospital you have your kids in school and for your kids to go to school or to get a place in the school so you need to get money from the patients.
I’ve argued for some time that the donors are complicate in the corruption and in fact they supported corruption in Mozambique. To when the world bank forced the local banks to give loans to privatised companies that the local banks said well they’ll never be repaid and the world bank said well we want you to give those loans anyway to support privatisation.
We learnt anecdotes that its just anecdotes but you know people could get a loan just on the back of a card you know and that was it that was a contract. I mean this is taking it to the extreme but the implication is that there was no proper credit assessment and risk assessment.
DIALOGUE
One particular case involved about 30 million dollars had been investigated had been exposed but there was no prosecution and the prosecution was actually blocked in the attorney general’s office by assistant attorney generals who simply destroyed documents and prevented the prosecution.
Monies had been diminished. Credit had been given to people who didn’t pay back and didn’t want to pay back partly or didn’t even bother explaining why they were not paying back.
In fact at one point the massive amount of money owed to the banks threatened to bring down the entire Mozambican economy.
To prop up the ailing privatised banks the government simply handed out money from the treasury. Money that should have been spent on desperately needed public services.
Despite the uncomfortable facts, there was no sign of an investigation.
This was because the people who were being charged were identifying very senior people in Felimo as having been complicity in this and Carlos Cardoso was also investigating that one. And as his investigations moved on into the pair of bank scandals he was assassinated on the 22nd of November 2000 gunned down in the street.
My husband was murdered on 11 August 2001.
Less than a year after Cardoso was assassinated, another person investigating the bank fraud was murdered. Antonio Siba Siba Macuacua one of the most senior people in the Mozambique central bank was nominated to head the Bank of Austral to clean up the mess. He discovered that senior people connected to the government were cycling off large amounts of money from the bank. He was strangled and thrown 13 flights down a central stairwell.
In my view I think that wasn’t really a bank. There was something very dirty inside that place. That’s why they killed my husband.
He was digging out all these financials ??? the problems asking people to pay back the monies you know and ending the contracts of people who didn’t deserve the contracts in his bank and all this stuff so he was killed.
He believed that if you want to be rich you must work hard for that. He was honest that’s why. I think they went there and killed him because they don’t want honest guys. I think so. Even when my husband died, they didn’t come here to me after the ceremony to tell me Akina what’s happening with your husband they never I used to go there and press them. Why, why are they doing it. What’s the reason of all those things? I think they want to hide the truth.
I mean the connection between the murder of Cardoso and Siba Siba, I think they key connection is the looting of the banking system. That’s the main, the principle note that links the two. The killing of the two. Both were fighting for clean up of the financial system for uprooting corruption. You will never heard Cardoso had succeeded in his campaign to help the head of state remove a team at ????? that were really apparently hampering the investigation of the cases.
A month after his death, Metical, the paper Cardoso founded revealed that no progress had been made in finding his killers. What’s more two policemen involved in the criminal investigation had direct links to those accused of looting the banks.
The case of Cardoso in my opinion we lost lots of times and one problem of the case was that the police did not work properly in the first days and the first period of time after the crime and many evidences were lost and most of the evidences that could allow the police and the judicial authorities to have strong links between the executors and the people who ordered the murder of Carlos Cardoso.
In the aftermath of Cardoso’s murder. Monthly vigils were held at the site of his killing. An international petition had collected many thousands of signatures.
Chisano began to face embarrassing questions when he travelled abroad.
DIALOGUE
There were some people from judiciary or probably from the attorney general’s office that with their behaviour disorganised some files on purpose and its also clear that one of those prosecutors ran away, he is now I think somewhere in South Africa or outside Mozambique.
In early November 2002 five men accused of the assassination finally face trial for the murder of Cardoso.
People were glued to television and throughout the country and to the remote villages they managed to pick up a television and follow the case. And in a way this brought Carlos and his work much further than he ever managed during his lifetime.
Too dangerous to be tried in court, the case came to Maputo top security prison. The sixth man and main ringleader Anilbalzinho was tried in his absence. He had mysteriously escaped from his maximum-security cell before the trial.
One of the things that came up in evidence during that trial is the president talking to ???? at the very least was involved in financial law violations, money laundering and so on. He admitted that much in the trial. He’s never been prosecuted and two of the people who were on trial who were convicted said that ???? ordered the killing and he’s never gonna go to trial there’s been no further investigation.
Some of the defendants had said that Mr Anilbalzinho was the connection between the killers and the payers, namely Mr ?????? and Mr ????? of course Mr ????? was not there to corroborate that accusation.
I hope that the fact of ????? president I hope and I believe that it will not affect the normal development of the file and of the case.
During the Cardoso trial there were allegations that some of the people were being tried for having colluded in the killing of Cardoso had celebrated the killing of Siba Siba while in jail.
To date very little progress has been made into the investigation and into the murder of Antonio Siba Siba.
We are very worried about that because Siba Siba case is a serious case and it deals with the economic environment in Mozambique.
It’s my right to know the truth because I have children. I can’t hide the truth from them everyday because they are growing. The elder is 11 and the youngest is 8. So one day they will ask my mum what’s happening to dad.
There is no pressure from the donors to prosecute in the Siba Siba case, Carlos Cardoso was killed, the donors didn’t bring very much pressure but it was the international community more generally and Mozambicans who brought pressure.
……Cardoso leaves me speechless…..
The donors are much more interested that the interest rate here should remain at 35% than they are that corruption should be controlled.
The donors need a success story. Mozambique internationally is a success story its supposed to be the success of structural adjustment and so the governors don’t wanna raise the issue that perhaps people close to the president are extremely corrupt.
There’s not a legal framework to prevent that this regime of ???? of banditry within institutions to be stopped.
…. Change penal law because …. Are not included in the penal code………legislation more adequate …… against corruption a success…. Without an anti corruption law ……. To fight corruption successfully.
… fight against corruption …. Responsibility of the attorney general…. Anti corruption unit. It cannot. …. If remaining institutions of ….. of the state itself …… involved with the same determination ….. making the anti corruption unit work.
There are people with power who would not really want this investigation to head on, to really come to some conclusions.
They ask very often frequently particularly the little one she went through all the details about the assassination it seemed to be something that she needed to talk about. She was very concerned about who had killed him and was very upset and saying that they must have known that they would hurt me by killing my father and that that was a very bad thing to do against her and Ibo. She went to the site where he was killed and looked at all the pictures and was trying to I found out she was going back and forth and back and forth and then I realised that she was actually looking for she thought there would be a picture of the killer or the killers at the site.
I’m not feeling safe. When I went to the bed I have to be certain that I locked all the doors. Maybe they are still coming to kill us because we are still praying for the government to investigate. In my view I think that the government are not interested and really to investigate to tell us what really happened at the Australian bank.
……Mozambican people are honest ……
Up to now the international donor community’s insistence on the rapid economic change without a clear legal framework has helped to create a state of lawlessness within the country.
The hope is that legal reform will begin to keep pace with economic development and that organised crime will no longer enjoy impurity. Whether or not the anti corruption unit is successful will depend on a renewed political and institutional determination to embrace justice.
Mozambican people are honest, ja. People here are very honest are workers. We are powered but we are honest and workers. The people who are going to do this wrong thing I believe that are few, ja are few. If we fight together we’ll get them one day.
Anibalzinho was captured in South Africa shortly after the trial and sentenced to 28 years in a maximum-security prison.
On May 9th 2004, the day before he was due to face interrogation on the killing of Cardoso, he was allowed to escape…. Again.
Three weeks later he was re-arrested in Toronto, Canada.
The treasury at the time was paying out a lot of money to bail out these banks and people were you know saying you know what are we paying. Who are the people who got this moneys you know somebody stole these monies.
…… society is the judicial system ………..
Mozambique 2004. Organised crime and corruption has become an embarrassment to the government of Felimo. Huge amounts of money have been stolen from the banks. The questions people are asking is, who stole this money and how did they get away with it.
We don’t have a judicial system. They can come to defend and enforce the interest of the poorest of the land.
And so that’s why you see here there are no prosecutions and that the elite feel free to manipulate state institutions to ensure their ability to steal substantial amounts of money.
DIALOGUE
To tackle the problem of organised crime, an anti corruption bill has recently been passed by parliament. And to help enforce it, an anti corruption unit has been formed. Isabel Rupea, Head of this unit has a difficult task ahead.
…… unit was established last year ….. doctor this is like the war for liberation
As a new wave of law students celebrate their graduation, they’re addressed by Judge ???? a senior judge known for campaigning to reform the legal system.
In Mozambique some magistrates, judges and prosecutors have been threatened and the environment among the judges and prosecutors is not very, very safe in that way.
…. Who was assassinated …… female judge who was murdered…… you never see examples of punishment
This falls into the overall pattern of clinic economic development in the country you have a number of very important families in Felimo. Five or six in my count. They have preference in business deals that involve state money – state funds or concessionary ??? from outside. They have a lot of influence in the use of donor money and this has probably been the pattern of ??? development throughout history and this is where we are at.
The murder of renowned investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso in November 2000 quickly drew international attention to the state of lawlessness in the country. At the time of his death, Cardoso was investigating large-scale bank fraud, and had received warnings not to continue.
I think that Carlos through his word became a very powerful man and a too powerful man in Mozambique. He was not afraid. He was not afraid of denouncing things that he saw were wrong in Mozambique in the society.
He was a journalist who investigated things and wouldn’t shut up. He was pursuing wherever they led and people who were inconvenienced by his investigations knew the only way to shut him up was to murder him.
There were two state owned banks. Bank of Commercial and the Bank of ????? which was later renamed Banco Austral. And in the mid 1990’s the world bank and the IMF insisted that those two banks be privatised.
Even before privatisation the banking sector was already experiencing serious problems with fraud. Corrupt businessmen had deposited millions of dollars worth of fraudulent cheques into Banco Austral. Money that did not exist that was later withdrawn as cash.
No one honest wanted those two Mozambican banks and the only people who would take them in both cases were a consortium of a corrupt foreign partner and corrupt members of the Mozambican elite who came together to make a bid.
The Felimo of Samora Michael had been intolerant of dishonesty amongst officials and people in power.
This was a socialist country with a lot of discipline within the leadership ranks for certain wrong doings if it would be some petty theft you would be punished.
DIALOGUE
When Mozambique gained independence from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975 the apartheid regime in South Africa along with the United States Government financed a civil war that would prevent Felimo from building a fair society for ordinary Mozambicans.
In 1986 Samora Michael died in a mysterious plane crash.
As the war with South Africa got worse the destruction here got really massive. Perhaps a 3rd of the population was displaced a million people died in this war and Mozambique became increasingly dependent on foreign assistance and foreign loans. Literally millions of dollars were flown in to keep Mozambique alive.
Civil war forced Mozambique to open its investment. Two things became imperative to engage this help. A United Nations led peace plan that would end the war. And the selling of state owned industry and services.
By the early 1990’s Cardoso had become an open critic of government economic policy.
It was not necessarily the politics of Felimo, the official politics of Felimo, which he continued to agree with. It was more that ehm, there were things that were developing that were not good for the society.
It endangered democracy itself I mean. If a parliament is not allowed to make decisions, if a governor if a country is not allowed to make the parliamentary decisions of governing the society obviously ????. Our democracy doesn’t mean anything. If we take a decision the government doesn’t like it. We cannot uphold our decisions. What does democracy mean, ehm, in a country that cannot make its own economic policy.
People got the impression that capitalism and market economy is something that has to do with who steals better and who steals faster.
There are really two kinds of corruption here. There is petty corruption at the level of officials and nurses and so on and there’s grand corruption at the level of the elite. And they have different routes. The petty corruption really originated in the early 1990’s when the IMF in its wisdom decided that Mozambican civil servants would work harder if they were paid wages that were below the poverty line.
One of the problems is that corruption is getting endemic its becoming a system. For example you need to send your kid to school but your kid doesn’t get in easily so you need to bribe someone in a school. So if you are a policeman you need to get the money from the drivers in the street to go to have your kids in school. Again if you are a nurse in a hospital you have your kids in school and for your kids to go to school or to get a place in the school so you need to get money from the patients.
I’ve argued for some time that the donors are complicate in the corruption and in fact they supported corruption in Mozambique. To when the world bank forced the local banks to give loans to privatised companies that the local banks said well they’ll never be repaid and the world bank said well we want you to give those loans anyway to support privatisation.
We learnt anecdotes that its just anecdotes but you know people could get a loan just on the back of a card you know and that was it that was a contract. I mean this is taking it to the extreme but the implication is that there was no proper credit assessment and risk assessment.
DIALOGUE
One particular case involved about 30 million dollars had been investigated had been exposed but there was no prosecution and the prosecution was actually blocked in the attorney general’s office by assistant attorney generals who simply destroyed documents and prevented the prosecution.
Monies had been diminished. Credit had been given to people who didn’t pay back and didn’t want to pay back partly or didn’t even bother explaining why they were not paying back.
In fact at one point the massive amount of money owed to the banks threatened to bring down the entire Mozambican economy.
To prop up the ailing privatised banks the government simply handed out money from the treasury. Money that should have been spent on desperately needed public services.
Despite the uncomfortable facts, there was no sign of an investigation.
This was because the people who were being charged were identifying very senior people in Felimo as having been complicity in this and Carlos Cardoso was also investigating that one. And as his investigations moved on into the pair of bank scandals he was assassinated on the 22nd of November 2000 gunned down in the street.
My husband was murdered on 11 August 2001.
Less than a year after Cardoso was assassinated, another person investigating the bank fraud was murdered. Antonio Siba Siba Macuacua one of the most senior people in the Mozambique central bank was nominated to head the Bank of Austral to clean up the mess. He discovered that senior people connected to the government were cycling off large amounts of money from the bank. He was strangled and thrown 13 flights down a central stairwell.
In my view I think that wasn’t really a bank. There was something very dirty inside that place. That’s why they killed my husband.
He was digging out all these financials ??? the problems asking people to pay back the monies you know and ending the contracts of people who didn’t deserve the contracts in his bank and all this stuff so he was killed.
He believed that if you want to be rich you must work hard for that. He was honest that’s why. I think they went there and killed him because they don’t want honest guys. I think so. Even when my husband died, they didn’t come here to me after the ceremony to tell me Akina what’s happening with your husband they never I used to go there and press them. Why, why are they doing it. What’s the reason of all those things? I think they want to hide the truth.
I mean the connection between the murder of Cardoso and Siba Siba, I think they key connection is the looting of the banking system. That’s the main, the principle note that links the two. The killing of the two. Both were fighting for clean up of the financial system for uprooting corruption. You will never heard Cardoso had succeeded in his campaign to help the head of state remove a team at ????? that were really apparently hampering the investigation of the cases.
A month after his death, Metical, the paper Cardoso founded revealed that no progress had been made in finding his killers. What’s more two policemen involved in the criminal investigation had direct links to those accused of looting the banks.
The case of Cardoso in my opinion we lost lots of times and one problem of the case was that the police did not work properly in the first days and the first period of time after the crime and many evidences were lost and most of the evidences that could allow the police and the judicial authorities to have strong links between the executors and the people who ordered the murder of Carlos Cardoso.
In the aftermath of Cardoso’s murder. Monthly vigils were held at the site of his killing. An international petition had collected many thousands of signatures.
Chisano began to face embarrassing questions when he travelled abroad.
DIALOGUE
There were some people from judiciary or probably from the attorney general’s office that with their behaviour disorganised some files on purpose and its also clear that one of those prosecutors ran away, he is now I think somewhere in South Africa or outside Mozambique.
In early November 2002 five men accused of the assassination finally face trial for the murder of Cardoso.
People were glued to television and throughout the country and to the remote villages they managed to pick up a television and follow the case. And in a way this brought Carlos and his work much further than he ever managed during his lifetime.
Too dangerous to be tried in court, the case came to Maputo top security prison. The sixth man and main ringleader Anilbalzinho was tried in his absence. He had mysteriously escaped from his maximum-security cell before the trial.
One of the things that came up in evidence during that trial is the president talking to ???? at the very least was involved in financial law violations, money laundering and so on. He admitted that much in the trial. He’s never been prosecuted and two of the people who were on trial who were convicted said that ???? ordered the killing and he’s never gonna go to trial there’s been no further investigation.
Some of the defendants had said that Mr Anilbalzinho was the connection between the killers and the payers, namely Mr ?????? and Mr ????? of course Mr ????? was not there to corroborate that accusation.
I hope that the fact of ????? president I hope and I believe that it will not affect the normal development of the file and of the case.
During the Cardoso trial there were allegations that some of the people were being tried for having colluded in the killing of Cardoso had celebrated the killing of Siba Siba while in jail.
To date very little progress has been made into the investigation and into the murder of Antonio Siba Siba.
We are very worried about that because Siba Siba case is a serious case and it deals with the economic environment in Mozambique.
It’s my right to know the truth because I have children. I can’t hide the truth from them everyday because they are growing. The elder is 11 and the youngest is 8. So one day they will ask my mum what’s happening to dad.
There is no pressure from the donors to prosecute in the Siba Siba case, Carlos Cardoso was killed, the donors didn’t bring very much pressure but it was the international community more generally and Mozambicans who brought pressure.
……Cardoso leaves me speechless…..
The donors are much more interested that the interest rate here should remain at 35% than they are that corruption should be controlled.
The donors need a success story. Mozambique internationally is a success story its supposed to be the success of structural adjustment and so the governors don’t wanna raise the issue that perhaps people close to the president are extremely corrupt.
There’s not a legal framework to prevent that this regime of ???? of banditry within institutions to be stopped.
…. Change penal law because …. Are not included in the penal code………legislation more adequate …… against corruption a success…. Without an anti corruption law ……. To fight corruption successfully.
… fight against corruption …. Responsibility of the attorney general…. Anti corruption unit. It cannot. …. If remaining institutions of ….. of the state itself …… involved with the same determination ….. making the anti corruption unit work.
There are people with power who would not really want this investigation to head on, to really come to some conclusions.
They ask very often frequently particularly the little one she went through all the details about the assassination it seemed to be something that she needed to talk about. She was very concerned about who had killed him and was very upset and saying that they must have known that they would hurt me by killing my father and that that was a very bad thing to do against her and Ibo. She went to the site where he was killed and looked at all the pictures and was trying to I found out she was going back and forth and back and forth and then I realised that she was actually looking for she thought there would be a picture of the killer or the killers at the site.
I’m not feeling safe. When I went to the bed I have to be certain that I locked all the doors. Maybe they are still coming to kill us because we are still praying for the government to investigate. In my view I think that the government are not interested and really to investigate to tell us what really happened at the Australian bank.
……Mozambican people are honest ……
Up to now the international donor community’s insistence on the rapid economic change without a clear legal framework has helped to create a state of lawlessness within the country.
The hope is that legal reform will begin to keep pace with economic development and that organised crime will no longer enjoy impurity. Whether or not the anti corruption unit is successful will depend on a renewed political and institutional determination to embrace justice.
Mozambican people are honest, ja. People here are very honest are workers. We are powered but we are honest and workers. The people who are going to do this wrong thing I believe that are few, ja are few. If we fight together we’ll get them one day.
Anibalzinho was captured in South Africa shortly after the trial and sentenced to 28 years in a maximum-security prison.
On May 9th 2004, the day before he was due to face interrogation on the killing of Cardoso, he was allowed to escape…. Again.
Three weeks later he was re-arrested in Toronto, Canada.