Anti-corruption office recovers 2.9 billion meticais

Maputo, 18 Jun (AIM) – Mozambique’s Central Office for the Fight against Corruption (GCCC) has recovered about three billion meticais (47 million US dollars, at the current exchange rate) resulting from 11,030 corruption cases that it prosecuted over the past ten years.

The GCCC will celebrate, on Thursday, its 20th anniversary. Its deputy director, Eduardo Sumana, told reporters on Monday that, of the 11,030 cases handled over the past decade, 10,403 were brought to a conclusion, which he described as a success rate of 94 per cent.

“We managed to seize 2.9 billion meticais, as well as 56 buildings and 83 vehicles that were the product of the illicit activities investigated”, he added.

Sumana was speaking in Maputo on the sidelines of a national meeting of the various offices subordinate to the Attorney-General –namely the GCCC, the Central Office for the Fight against Organised and Transnational Crime (GCCCOT), and the Central Office for the Recovery of Assets (GCRA).

The director of the asset recovery office, Ana Sheila Marrengula, declared “We wish to assure Mozambican society that, as the Office for the Recovery of Assets, we shall fight implacably against organized crime, by seizing from criminals goods that were acquired illicitly, as well as the funds removed illegally from State coffers and from citizens”.

The director of the GCCCOT, Americo Letela, said that, in order to face new crimes, the institution must be endowed with technical and technological resources that can face the sophisticated methods used by criminals.

“Although this office has been created recently”, he said, “with some limitations in terms of material resources, judging by the results we have achieved, we expect an efficient performance from this office in preventing an fighting against organized crime in the coming period”.

At the opening of the meeting, Attorney-General Beatriz Buchili condemned attempts to intimidate magistrates and law officers during investigations involving corruption, organized and transnational crime, and asset recovery.

She said “we have been experiencing attempts at intimidation in order to discourage us from pursuing our mission”. These attempts “are an affront to the administration of justice, to the democratic rule of law and they weaken the institutions of justice.”

She encouraged prosecutors and others involved in the administration of justice not to be intimidated, but to remain firm in the fulfillment of their mission to fight crime.

According to Buchili, it was the emergence and growth of new criminal phenomena of a complex and transnational nature that prompted the establishment of the GCCC, GCCCOT and GCRA, as bodies under the aegis of the Attorney-General.

“These are specialized and autonomous bodies, and we note that there is always a need to periodically check the pace at which each of the bodies is progressing”, said Buchili.

She added that the lack of specialized human resources and asset recovery offices across the country, as well as the shortage of researchers and financial analysts has been a major challenge in the fight against crime.

“One of the characteristics of crime today, especially organized crime, is that it generates high profits for criminals, to the detriment of the revenue that should go into state coffers to provide basic services”, she said.

Convicted defendants, she said, must be deprived of their illicitly acquired assets, which must then be returned to the state or to their victims.

Buchili also called for effective implementation of the law on preventing and repressing terrorism, in order to identify and punish those responsible for terrorist activities.

This law, she recalled, envisages setting up a “National Mechanism for the Prevention, Repression and Fight against Terrorism and the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction”. This mechanism is intended to share information and coordinate between the stakeholders in this matter, but currently it is only operating with focal points, and does not possess the technical structure that would allow it to pursue the attributes granted by the law.

(AIM)

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