
Procuradora-Geral da República, Beatriz Buchili, apresenta informa anual a Assembleia da Republica, o parlamento moçambicano
Maputo, 24 Apr (AIM) – Although Mozambique’s National Criminal Investigation Service (Sernic) should be a priority body in the fight against crime, since its creation in 2017, it has not been given the resources to recruit new staff or obtain modern equipment, denounced the country’s Attorney-General, Beatriz Buchili, on Wednesday.
Giving her annual report on the state of the justice system to the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, Buchili said that Sernic has been unable to recruit or train staff for its various investigation specialisms.
It has been forced to depend on staff inherited from its predecessor, the now abolished Criminal Investigation Police.
Buchili said she has repeatedly called for the government to allocate annual quotas of staff for Sernic, just as happens with the judiciary, but so far without success.
This lack of trained staff, she added, has a major impact on the ability of Sernic “to respond speedily to the crimes which alarm our society, such as terrorism, kidnapping and drug trafficking”.
Furthermore, Sernic lacked adequate technical equipment, laboratories and vehicles. For some investigations, Sernic had to request assistance from neighbouring countries, who did not always respond.
No new premises had been built for Sernic, and some of the buildings it was renting did not have the basic conditions for investigative work “which seriously compromises the quality of its services”, added Buchili.
To make matters worse, some of Sernic’s staff were corrupt. 26 criminal proceedings had been opened against Sernic members in 2023.
Basic measures such as a distinctive uniform and identity cards for Sernic have not been taken, which helped criminals impersonate Sernic staff. “Episodes of this sort can bring discredit on our criminal investigation body, and compromise its necessary collaboration with citizens”, said Buchili.
The PGR is also charged with inspecting the country’s prisons, and once again those inspections have shown that Mozambican prisons are grossly overcrowded.
Buchili said that, as of 31 December, the country’s prisons had 21,814 inmates – but they had been built for no more than 8,873. The overcrowding was thus 146 per cent.
Worse still, only 15,694 inmates were serving prison sentences passed by the courts. The other 6,120 were in preventive detention.
Buchili said the PGR has been pushing for the use of alternatives to prison sentences (such as fines and forms of community service), apparently without much success.
The PGR had also found foreigners in Mozambican jails, who had no consular assistance or contact with their families. Inexplicably, the authorities kept them in prison instead of simply expelling them from the country.
Some prison guards, Buchili accused, were involved in allowing inmates to escape, and forbidden goods (such as drugs and cell phones) to enter the prisons.
Buchili’s report said that in 2023, 519 cases of money laundering were detected, 449 of which were the result of investigations into previous crimes of corruption, drug trafficking, environmental crimes, tax fraud and kidnappings.
“We found situations of illegal export of money, using fraudulent mechanisms, simulating the import of goods which, in reality, did not take place”, she said. “By way of example, a group of Mozambican and foreign individuals, some of whom were based in the northern province of Nampula set up front companies using forged documents”.
“Between 2019 and 2023, they managed to illegally export an amount of about 330 million dollars, to China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Dubai, Mauritius, Portugal and Turkey”, she added.
The investigations revealed the involvement of public employees and customs agents “who facilitated and issued documents”, as well as banking staff “who omitted their duties to examine and control the procedures, thus contributing to the fraudulent incorporation of companies, the illegal export of currency, deposits of large sums of money in cash and other practices that encourage money laundering”, she said.
Buchili did not name any of the companies or individuals involved in this immense money laundering scheme.
(AIM)
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