Former Mozambican finance minister Manuel Chang. (Wikus de Wet/AFP)
Former Mozambican finance minister Manuel Chang will be surrendered to the United States within a day or two to stand trial for his alleged role in Mozambique’s “Secret Debt” scandal after spending more than four years in prison in South Africa.
Well-placed sources confirmed that a US government jet landed at Lanseria airport on Sunday with members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and that Chang will soon be released into their custody.
This comes after Justice Minister Ronald Lamola signed off on a memorandum authorising his extradition. It is reliably understood that it is now a matter of ticking administrative boxes before the flight departs.
Chang will be flown to New York where he was indicted on 19 December 2018 on charges that include conspiracy to commit fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money-laundering.
He was arrested at OR Tambo International Airport just 10 days later.
The US filed a formal extradition request in January 2019 and Mozambique followed suit in February that year. Faced with two competing requests, then justice minister Michael Masutha decided in May to surrender Chang to Mozambique.
Shortly afterwards, Masutha was replaced by Lamola, who asked the high court to set aside the decision and refer the matter back to him. The minister opposed an application by Chang demanding that he either be returned to Mozambique or released.
The court held, in a ruling that would become known as Chang I, that it “would make no sense to extradite a person to a place where he cannot be prosecuted” and that hence the only valid request was that filed by US authorities. It referred the matter back to Lamola.
But Chang would spend another year in a Pretoria prison cell before the minister decided in August 2021 to extradite him to Mozambique after all.
Well-placed sources have suggested the minister was obliged to cede to regional realpolitik, given the embarrassment Mozambique’s Frelimo government faces if Chang is tried on foreign soil.
His decision was successfully taken on legal review by the Fórum de Monitoria do Orçamento, a Maputo-based umbrella body of civil society organisations, which argued that Chang’s immunity as anMP may not have been lifted, but even if it had, he may still be shielded by systemic corruption and largesse linked to his former role as a member of government.
The high court set aside the minister’s decision and ordered that he be surrendered to the US.
The Mozambican government first approached the supreme court of appeal and then the constitutional court for leave to appeal but was denied by both.
The apex court in May said there was no reasonable prospects of success on the merit of the application, leaving the government with no legal option but to hand Chang over to US authorities.
The charges stem from an elaborate fraud scheme that triggered a sovereign default in Mozambique in 2016.
Some three years earlier, Chang signed off on state guarantees for €2 billion of loans extended to Mozambican parastatals by foreign banks, including Credit Suisse.
The money, a fair share of which came from investors in the US, was ostensibly intended to support the development of Mozambique’s tuna fishing industry and pay for trawlers and coastal patrol vessels. But it flowed instead to Chang and his alleged co-conspirators, believed to include the son of former president Armando Guebuza.