Manuel Chang denied bail in New York over flight-risk fears

Former Mozambican finance minister Manuel Chang, who was extradited from South Africa to the US on Wednesday to face fraud and money laundering charges, was denied bail in a New York district court on Thursday. 

Hoping to be free at last after more than four years in prison in South Africa, Chang pleaded not guilty to the charges before district court judge Nicholas Garaufis and offered to post a bond of $1-million if granted bail.

But Judge Garaufis denied bail, agreeing with prosecutors that he was a flight risk and could escape the charges by entering Mozambique’s UN mission in Manhattan.

“The evidence regarding his guilt on the face of it is strong,” Garaufis said, ordering that Chang remain in custody. 

Chang’s American lawyers are nevertheless hoping that the district court will still throw out the case against him on the grounds that it has  been more than four years since he was arrested in South Africa.

This delay has prejudiced Chang by damaging his chances of getting a fair trial, his attorney, Adam Ford, told Garaufis in a letter last month.

He asked Garaufis for permission to move to dismiss the indictment because the prosecution’s delay had violated Chang’s right to a speedy trial under the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution. 

Ford told Daily Maverick on Thursday that the judge had agreed to a hearing on whether or not to dismiss the case against Chang because of the delay. 

In his letter to Garaufis last month, Ford said that since Chang’s arrest in South Africa in December 2018, “he has been incarcerated in South Africa in appalling conditions, including solitary confinement”. 

Read more in Daily Maverick: Manuel Chang case shows how public interest litigation can further accountability for economic crimes

“He has had limited contact with his own family and can only speak to them through a glass partition. The South African government has also failed to meet Mr Chang’s medical needs. He has an injured knee, but he has been unable to receive physical therapy during his detention. Moreover, the South African authorities have failed to provide Mr Chang with a low-sodium diet, even though he has high blood pressure.”

And the competing requests for Change’s extradition from the US and Mozambique had “trapped him in a Kafkaesque labyrinth of never-ending administrative and court proceedings”, Ford said. This referred to the South African government twice ordering that Chang should be extradited to Mozambique and South African courts overruling the government both times and eventually ordering him to be extradited to the US instead.  

Ford also claimed that although the Department of Justice had requested Chang’s extradition more than four years ago, it had “lost interest in seeking his extradition since 2019” when a jury in the same Brooklyn court had acquitted Chang’s co-defendant, Jean Boustani.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Manuel Chang finally on way to the US after FBI kept waiting due to red tape delays

Boustani had worked for Privinvest, the Abu-Dhabi based ship-building company which built a fleet of tuna-fishing boats and patrol vessels for the Mozambique government. Chang, when still finance minister, secretly signed government guarantees in 2013 and 2014 for loans totalling about $2-billion to buy the vessels. But the US indictment against Chang, Boustani and others alleged that the whole project was just a scam to elicit the loans so they could all siphon off bribes. 

Intends to ‘fight’