Former Assistant Attorney-General Under Fire

Rupia was a judge on the Maputo City Court before she was seconded to work in the Attorney General's Office in 2001, where she was, for a period, in charge of the Central Office for the Fight Against Corruption (GCCC). However, she failed to bring a single case of corruption before the courts.

Rupia was dismissed as Assistant Attorney General last year. This did not imply any disgrace, and she should simply have resumed her old job as a judge.

But she delayed, and only recently did she request reinstatement as a judge. This led to the first disciplinary cases against her, in which she is accused of abandoning her post, because of her failure to request a position in the judiciary immediately after she left the Attorney-General's Office.

Far more serious, however, is a second case against Rupia, arising from a complaint to the CSMJ made by the current Attorney-General, Augusto Paulino. For Rupia appears to be the source for articles published in the right-wing weekly ":Zambeze" libeling Paulino.

Paulino was accused of stealing 300,000 meticais (about 12,500 US dollars) from state funds when he was presiding judge of the Maputo Provincial Court. This claim came in a denunciation signed by an official of the Maputo Provincial Court, named Adelaide Muchanga, and was dated 26 November 2006.

Yet the denunciation was kept under wraps until the very moment, in June 2007, that President Armando Guebuza decided to appoint Paulino Attorney-General, and approached the CSMJ to ask whether there was any impediment to the appointment. Only then did Paulino's predecessor, Joaquim Madeira, who had Rupia as one of his trusted lieutenants, forward Machanga's denunciation to the CSMJ.

The CSMJ investigated the allegation, and a month later, on 19 July, concluded that there was no evidence that Paulino had committed any crime, and that Machanga's denunciation had been made "in bad faith". A few days later, Madeira's office sent the same allegation to the Supreme Court, in order for criminal proceedings against Paulino to be initiated. But the Supreme Court came to exactly the same conclusion as the CSMJ - namely that no crime had been committed. Paulino could thus never be described as an accused, because there was never any crime that could be the subject of a charge sheet.

Nonetheless, extracts from the case file that seemed to damn Paulino appeared in "Zambeze", but never those that exonerated him. The paper deceived its readers into imagining that there were still serious charges outstanding against Paulino.

When it was pointed out that the public prosecutor's office had issued a dispatch abstaining from making any charge against Paulino, "Zambeze" questioned the truthfulness of this, and ran an interview with Rupia in which she declared "I did not issue a dispatch of abstention".

Paulino's complaint is that Rupia's intervention violated the sub judice rules, by commenting in the press on matters that were still going through the legal procedures.

Rupia gave the impression that she was handling the case against Paulino - but by this time, she was no longer in the Attorney-General's Office, and it was the sole assistant attorney-general still at his post after the removal of Madeira and his team, Erasmo Nhavoto, who issued the dispatch declining to charge Paulino with any crime.

When "O Pais" contacted Rupia about the two cases against her, she told the paper she knew nothing about the matter.

[source: AIM NEWS]