Maputo, 13 Aug (AIM) – Of the three suspects in the case of the murder, in 2001, of banker Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua, only one can be located, and he may be too ill to stand trial, according to a report in the independent newssheet “Carta de Mocambique”.
This case dates back to the late 1990s and the disastrous privatisation of the Austral Bank on the orders of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The People’s Development Bank (BPD) was well-run, as independent audits showed. But the late 1990s was the height of the IMF’s privatisation mania. It did not matter how well the BPD was run – it was state-owned and so it had to go. The IMF threated that all aid to Mozambique would be halted, unless the BPD was privatised by 30 June 1997.
Faced with this ultimatum, a consortium was thrown together to take over the BPD. The Mozambican side of this consortium was Invester, a group headed by former Minister of Industry, Octavio Muthemba.
A supposedly credible foreign partner was found in the shape of the Malaysian Southern Bank Berhard (SBB). The consortium took over the BPD and within three years the new owners had run it into the ground. Loans had been offered to people with no means of repaying them, many of them linked to the ruling Frelimo Party.
The Austral management made no attempt to sort out their mess. Instead, the Malaysian managers just handed their shares back to the Mozambican state and fled the country. An audit by the company KPMG in January 2001 showed that Austral had been looted of 40 million dollars in three years.
The then governor of the Bank of Mozambique, Adriano Maleiane (later Prime Minister), decided to step in, and to publish lists of Austral’s bad debtors. He put a respected economist, Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua, then head of the banking supervision department in the central bank at the head of a new Austral board. In an unprecedented move, SibaSiba published a list of Austral debtors in the Maputo daily “Noticias”. (Although the list was very long, apparently it did not include some of the largest debtors).
Within a few weeks of the publication of the list, Siba-Siba was murdered. His body was thrown down the stairwell at Austral headquarters in central Maputo.
Lacklustre investigations into the murder continued for several years until, on 22 May 2009, the Attorney-General’s Office named three people as suspects. They were Carlos Parente Junior, a member of the Austral Bank Board, regarded as the number two to Siba-Siba, and two security guards, Jose Passaje and Carlos Sitoe.
But a judge in the Maputo City Law Court, Paulo Cinco Reis, found it strange that none of the Austral debtors had been named as suspects – and so he threw the case out. “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”, wrote Reis.
The PGR appealed against the judge’s ruling but the appeals court did not hear the case until it suddenly came back to life in September 2024. The Appeals Court rejected the ruling by Reis and, on 12 September formally changed the same three suspects – Benigno Parente Júnior, Jose Passaje and Carlos Sitoe, with the murder.
So will there finally be a trial? Perhaps not – for, according to “Carta de Mocambique”, the whereabouts of the two former security guards are unknown.
Parente Junior is said to be seriously ill, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. This debilitating mental illness may make it impossible for him to testify.
The result of the huge delays, imposed by the lethargy of the Mozambican legal system, and the obvious unwillingness of the IMF to demand an outcome, means that the murderers are unlikely to face justice.
(AIM)
Pf/ (665)
