According to Hélder Pitta Grós, the PGR continues to work on the case involving the former president of the state oil company Sonangol, ensuring that the work proceeds with "patience and serenity".
"We are working on this process, gathering evidence is not always easy. You know that engineer Manuel Vicente is abroad, these financial crimes are committed in several countries, we have to depend a lot on the cooperation of other countries, on the information we can receive and these countries also have their strategies, they have their policies and they do not always correspond to the extent we need", said the magistrate in response to Lusa, at the end of a lecture on "The Beginning of the National Liberation Struggle", organized by the PGR.
"This is a set of situations that mean we don't always have news to give, but we have to be patient and calm to work," he stressed.
Since 2022, authorities have assumed they are working on a case against Manuel Vicente, who enjoyed legal immunities for holders of public office for five years, after his departure from the executive, at the time led by former head of state José Eduardo dos Santos, which expired in September 2022.
In 2018, Portugal initiated a process known as "Operation Fizz", in which the former vice president was accused of having corrupted the Portuguese prosecutor Orlando Figueira, causing an "irritation" between the two countries, tension that was resolved after the case concerning Manuel Vicente was transferred to Angola.
There are suspicions about the former strongman of the Angolan state oil company and 'number two' to former president José Eduardo dos Santos, now deceased, that he was linked to corruption and money laundering schemes when he worked at Sonangol.
Pitta Grós assured, on the other hand, that the fight against corruption in Angola has not diminished, pointing to the investigative processes and arrests of senior officials of the General Tax Administration (AGT) and the Migration and Foreigners Service (SME), which he said resulted from joint work between the PGR and the Criminal Investigation Service (SIC).
Senior AGT officials have been arrested in recent days for alleged involvement in a fraudulent VAT refund scheme involving a diversion of 7 billion kwanzas.
At the end of January, authorities arrested the director of the SME's general director's office and the head of the Human Resources department of the same body, for alleged crimes of criminal association, undue receipt of benefits and passive corruption due to strong evidence of involvement in a fraudulent scheme of irregular classification of candidates at the institution.
Regarding these cases, the PGR assured that the body is already working on these processes, which "are still under judicial secrecy".
"We are still in the investigation and preparatory instruction phase and we will wait patiently for things to happen. We are working quickly, with great objectivity so that we can, in the shortest possible time, give society satisfaction", he assured Lusa.
Regarding cryptocurrency mining crimes in Angola, a process that has resulted in the arrest of several Angolan and foreign citizens, especially Asians, and the deactivation of several clandestine houses and shipyards, Hélder Pitta Grós assured that "soon" some cases will be sent to the courts.
"Unfortunately, as we thought that in our country we didn't have this type of activity [cryptocurrency mining], we were also not prepared in terms of equipment, in our own technologies (...). Only now are we working in this direction, in the acquisition of this equipment, we already have magistrates trained in these areas. Now they have started to work and we believe that within a short time we will already have some processes introduced in the Justice system", concluded the prosecutor.
