"Well, there is in fact a document from Mr Rafael Marques that he sent to the PGR, but we need to see that the documents that appear in the form of a complaint are not always very concrete, sometimes they are abstract, and we are the ones who will have to (...) carry out investigations, but for that we need to have some concrete evidence that will make it easier for us to do this work", Hélder Pitta Grós responded to Lusa.
Without going into details, the judge assured that the body is carrying out the investigations "with a certain degree of secrecy".
Pitta Grós was speaking this Thursday, in Luanda, at the end of a lecture on "The Beginning of the National Liberation Struggle", promoted by the PGR as part of the 64th anniversary of the beginning of the armed struggle for national liberation, celebrated on Tuesday, February 4th.
At the end of January, activist Rafael Marques called for a criminal investigation against the Minister of State for Economic Coordination, José de Lima Massano, on suspicion of embezzlement, influence peddling, money laundering and tax fraud.
At issue, according to the complaint filed with the Attorney General's Office, to which Lusa had access, is the alleged overbilling of the Currency Museum, "a simple structure, with an underground floor", which cost 64.5 million dollars, six times the initial value.
The complaint filed by the activist and director of the research portal Maka Angola states that in just two years the cost of the museum has gone from just over 10 million dollars to 64.5 million dollars.
The contract for the architectural project, signed in July 2012 by Lima Massano, then governor of the National Bank of Angola (BNA), was developed by FCL.AO-Arquitectos Associados, owned by brothers Alexandre and António Falcão Costa Lopes, who charged 460,000 dollars in fees, 4.5 percent of the estimated value of the work (10 million dollars and 195 thousand), whose gross construction area was initially 2615 square meters, the document reads.
The construction contract was awarded to the consortium formed by the companies Griner, Somague and Tecnasol, on April 11, 2013, for a value of 14.4 million dollars for "excavation, peripheral containment and foundations", and the project was later changed, with an increase in the gross area to 4350 square meters, which made the value soar to 28 million dollars, and forced the readjustment of the payment to FCL.AO to 940 thousand dollars, it adds.
On April 14, 2014, Lima Massano signed a new contract with Griner and Somague for the construction of the structure and finishing work worth 13.6 million dollars and on November 4, 2014, he signed a contract for the "architecture and finishing" phase worth 16.7 million dollars, according to the complaint.
