Achirafo Aboobacar, Magistrate Judge of the Maputo City Superior Court of Appeal, revealed that there has been sabotage in the process of the former Banco Comercial de Moçambique (BCM), now Millennium Bim, 19 years after its conclusion.

Relevant pages of the process were reportedly stolen and destroyed by suspected citizens belonging to the organized crime circuit, which came to create some instability in one of the largest post-independence financial deadlock trials.

Quoted by the newspaper "Notícias", Aboobacar is said to have made these statements before friends and family.

"There was sabotage during the instruction of the process. I don't know who did it. I only became aware of it because the reading I was doing of the pages had no sequence. It was all messed up, a sign that someone had tampered with the process" he revealed.

Faced with this situation, the judge explained that he had to make an order directing the clerk of the section to contact the BCM team in order to provide copies of the missing documents to reorganize it.

"The clerk was very competent and led this process along with the bank's experts. We had to review the pages and this exercise took many months. The BCM provided the documents again and so we were able to replace what had been removed from the records. I had to find four months working on putting them back together again," he said.

He revealed that the Supreme Court made an office available, which was so that they would not suffer pressure. He explained that in the Judicial Court of Maputo City there were no conditions to work on this mega-process, and they would be under a lot of pressure.

Usually these long cases have a reputation, because of the defendants and the volume of pages that make it up. Usually when you're dealing with cases of this nature you tend to think it's a mega-case. For me, it was a very big challenge, because it was a case that when I received it had 27 volumes, something abnormal," he recalled.

As a reminder, journalist Carlos Cardoso, at the time owner and editor of the newspaper "Metical", was murdered while investigating the BCM fraud that occurred in the mid-1990s.