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South Africa will this week hand Mozambique’s former finance minister to the US, where he faces trial over the $2bn “tuna bonds” scandal, reigniting one of Africa’s biggest corruption cases.
Manuel Chang lost a battle against US extradition in May, almost five years after he was arrested in Johannesburg on US fraud charges related to the looting of hundreds of millions of dollars from loans that he approved for issuance in 2013.
The loans for maritime projects, which included a state tuna fishing fleet, devastated Mozambique’s economy and led directly to the southern African nation defaulting on its sovereign debt, amid allegations of bribery, concealment and the embezzlement of an estimated at least $500mn.
The fallout led to a $475mn fine for Credit Suisse, the arranger of the debt, and ongoing litigation in London, in which the Mozambican state has sought to cancel the debts but also declined to detail what President Filipe Nyusi knew of the loans as defence minister at the time.
Chang’s handover to the US, which opens the way for the most important foreign trial of the long-running saga, could embarrass Nyusi’s governing Frelimo party, which unsuccessfully sought to have him extradited back to Mozambique.
“We are extraditing him to the US. He was arrested in South Africa and will be handed over this week,” South Africa’s police said, after the country’s highest court threw out Mozambique’s appeal against Chang’s extradition.
A Gulfstream jet registered to the US Department of Justice landed at a private airport near Johannesburg on Sunday, according to flight-tracking websites.
“The fact that Chang is being extradited to America sends a strong message to the elites who have undermined the development of Mozambique,” said Adriano Nuvunga, chair of the Fórum de Monitoria do Orçamento, a budget watchdog that fought the Mozambican bid to halt the extradition.
“We hope Chang will speak, tell us who gave the orders and where the missing funds are. Almost half a billion dollars is unaccounted for,” he added.
Chang has always denied wrongdoing and his US lawyers have said they will seek to dismiss the case in New York because it has taken too long to come to trial.
In 2019, a previous US trial in the scandal ended in the acquittal on charges of fraud and money laundering of a salesman of boats acquired through the loans. Three former Credit Suisse bankers had earlier pleaded guilty for arranging kickbacks on the debt issue.
After 2016, when the tuna bond collapsed, the fraud cost the country $11bn or the equivalent of its entire gross domestic product that year, Mozambique’s Centre for Public Integrity and the Norwegian Chr Michelsen Institute have estimated.