Maputo – Mozambique will appeal a South African court’s decision to extradite former finance minister Manuel Chang to the United States over a $2 billion loan scandal, the attorney general’s office said on Thursday.
“The Republic of Mozambique does not accept that decision,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement.
Its lawyers in South Africa will appeal to the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg to reverse the decision and seek his return to Maputo, it added.
Chang has been held in South Africa since 2018 at the request of US authorities, over his alleged involvement in the huge “hidden debt” affair which plunged Mozambique into financial crisis.
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South Africa’s justice ministry had initially agreed to extradite him to Maputo, where 19 other people are on trial over the same case.
A coalition of Mozambican civil society groups challenged that decision, arguing that he might receive immunity in his home country.
A judge on Wednesday agreed with them, ordering Chang to be sent to the United States to face trial.
The charges relate to loans taken out by the Mozambican government when Chang was finance minister in 2013 and 2014, supposedly to buy a new fleet of tuna fishing and maritime security vessels.
Hidden from parliament and undeclared to the country’s international donors, the loans were the equivalent of 12% of the gross domestic product of one of the poorest countries in the world.
The United States wants to prosecute Chang because part of the money went through the US financial system.
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Picture: Getty Images
Source: AFP
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