The High Court in London revealed on Monday that the President of the Republic, Filipe Nyusi, will benefit from diplomatic immunity during the trial of the case of Mozambique's hidden debts in the British courts.

The decision was made public on Monday, when Judge Robin Knowles ruled that Filipe Nyusi "has immunity from the jurisdiction of this Court for as long as he is head of state of the Republic" of Mozambique.

According to the order, quoted by Lusa, President Nyusi was notified on April 14, 2023 of the current proceedings taking place in the London Commercial Court, part of the Supreme Court, and not in October 2021, as the lawyers for the Privinvest shipping group had stated.

The naval group and founder Iskandar Safa named the leader of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) as a "fourth party" in the case because they believe that, if the accusations of conspiracy and corruption against him are proven, Nyusi should be held responsible for the "same damage".

According to the documentation presented in court at the hearings at the beginning of August, the Lebanese group's lawyers argued that if Privinvest is found to have "made payments to Mozambican officials and that these payments were illegal, then consequently the payments made to the Fourth Party were also illegal and the Fourth Party is liable for the same damages".

At issue, they say, is a million US dollars paid into an account in the name of Sunflower International in 2014, following a request to Jean Boustani, a Privinvest negotiator, to finance Nyusi's election campaign separately from the funds contributed directly to Frelimo.

Privinvest is also alleged to have contributed a total of 10 million US dollars in 2014 to Frelimo, with the aim of financing Nyusi's presidential campaign and the party's associated campaign for the National Assembly elections.

Filipe Nyusi was Minister of Defense when the contracts with Privinvest were signed and loans of around 2.7 billion dollars were taken out with the banks Credit Suisse and VTB between 2013 and 2014, according to the indictment by the Mozambican Public Prosecutor's Office.

The loans were assessed secretly by the Frelimo government when Armando Guebuza was still head of state, without the knowledge of parliament and the Administrative Court.

The case, uncovered in 2016, became known as "hidden debts" and led to the suspension of international support, including from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which only recently resumed financial aid to the country.

The Mozambican Attorney General's Office launched legal action in the UK in 2019 to try to cancel the 622 million dollar debt owed by state company ProIndicus to Credit Suisse, claiming that the contracts were the result of corruption.

Meanwhile, the case has added more cases related to the suspension of debt payments by Mozambique to be tried together between October and December 2023.

In addition to Nyusi, several senior civil servants and state figures, such as Guebuza and former finance minister Manuel Chang, are named in the London case.

In a trial in Maputo of the same case that concluded in December, 11 of the 19 defendants were sentenced to between 10 and 12 years in prison.

Three of them, Ndambi Guebuza, son of former president Armando Guebuza, and two former SISE leaders, Gregório Leão and António Carlos do Rosário, were also ordered to pay compensation to the state equivalent to 2.8 billion dollars.