allAfrica.com: Mozambique: Siba-Siba Murder - Four Questioned (Page 1 of 1)

After years of stagnation, investigations into the 2001 murder of Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua, interim chairman of the crisis-ridden Austral Bank at the time of his death, moved forward this week with prosecutors questioning four senior figures from the bank.

Austral was once the state-owned People's Development Bank (BPD), but, under pressure from the World Bank and the IMF, the government privatised it in 1997. A Malaysian-Mozambican consortium, led by the Malaysian Southern Bank Berhard, purchased 60 per cent of the bank, while the state held on to the other 40 percent.

The Mozambican partner in the consortium was a group called Invester, headed by former Industry Minister Octavio Muthemba. Among its other members were the companies Multipac and SOTEC, owned by Jamu Hassane and Alvaro Massinga. Muthemba became chairman of the board of the BPD, which was soon renamed Austral.

Four years of reckless mismanagement followed, and by 2001 Austral was sinking under a huge burden of non-performing loans. The bad loans accounted for 34 per cent of its total credit portfolio. The bank needed more money to make provisions for likely defaults on many of the loans. But rather than recapitalize the bank, the private consortium pulled out in April 2001, and handed its shares back to the Mozambican state.

The Bank of Mozambique stepped in, and appointed Siba-Siba, a young economist who was head of its banking supervision department, as chairman of a three member interim board of directors for Austral. His tasks were to ascertain the true state of the ruined bank, and prepare it for a new privatization.

Siba-Siba started a loan recovery programme. He pursued the bank's many debtors vigorously, and even published a list of 1,200 of their names in the daily paper "Noticias".

But on 11 August 2001, Siba-Siba's body was found lying at the bottom of the stairwell at Austral headquarters in central Maputo. The hand rail on the staircase is high enough to make an accidental fall into the stairwell almost impossible, and family and friends ruled out suicide. South African forensic experts were called in at once, and confirmed that Siba-Siba had been murdered.

Almost seven years have passed, and no-one has been arrested for this crime. Nor have any arrests been made in connection with the collapse of the Austral Bank, though the government did eventually, under strong pressure, order a forensic audit of the bank.

The case only began to move in 2007, with the appointment of a new Attorney-General, Augusto Paulino, who rose to prominence four years earlier when he sentenced the six murderers of investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso to long prison terms.

Paulino made the Siba-Siba case one of his priorities, and appointed a team headed by a prosecutor, and including officers of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), to deal exclusively with the Siba-Siba murder and the associated looting of Austral.

Thursday press reports indicate that this team is working seriously - and questioned four suspects on Monday and Tuesday. According to a report in the independent newsheet "Mediafax", these were among a list of seven people who might have been interested in the elimination of Siba-Siba because of his debt recovery programme. "Mediafax" quoted sources in the Attorney-General's Office who said that arrest warrants might soon be issued.

Thursday's issue of the right-wing weekly "Zambeze" named those interviewed as Muthemba, Hassane, Massinga and Parente Junior. Hassane had been a non-executive director of Austral, and Massinga had been a member of the bank's Supervisory Board. Parente Junior was a member of the interim board of directors headed by Siba-Siba.

There is no indication what questions the prosecutors asked. But the fact that these are described as "sessions of questions" rather than "declarations" is significant. According to a legal source contacted by AIM, while "declarations" can be taken from anybody who might know anything about the crime, "questions" are only asked of people who are suspects.

The initial investigations into the murder were cloaked in secrecy. The findings of the South African forensic experts, for instance, have never been made public and even simple questions (such as, was Siba-Siba already dead before he was thrown down the stairwell?) have gone unanswered.

A key suspect was a Portuguese citizen named Luis Cabeca Viegas, who worked in the Austral financial directorate, and is believed to be one of the last people who spoke to Siba-Siba on the day of his death. He was questioned several times by PIC in September 2001, and the police were suspicious enough to hold onto his passport and residence permit.

Somehow these documents were returned to him later that month so that he could take 30 days holiday in Portugal. He has never returned.

No explanation about the release of the passport has ever been provided. It is known that both the surviving members of the Austral interim board, Parente Junior and Arlete Patel, supported the request by Viegas for the return of his passport. But both the then head of the Maputo branch of PIC, Antonio Frangoulis, and the then Interior Minister, Almerinho Manhenje, were reported as wanting to keep Viegas in the country. That would seem to indicate that it was the Attorney-General's Office, then led by Joaquim Madeira, that authorized the return of the passport.

A 2003 report that a convicted murderer, Carlos Silva Arrumacao, who had escaped from prison a month before the Siba-Siba assassination, had been re-arrested and charged with the murder proved untrue. Since then the trail had apparently gone completely cold.

Meanwhile Austral prospered. The second privatization went ahead in December 2001, with the South African banking group ABSA acquiring 80 per cent of the shares. After the British bank Barclays took over ABSA, Austral underwent another name change and is currently Barclays Mozambique.

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