"We have a law that is clear in saying that asset recovery starts after a final judgment, but unfortunately we have been getting asset recovery information outside the process itself, so for me it's all abnormal," said the lawyer in an interview with Lusa.
The lawyer states that the Asset Recovery Law is the "guiding instrument for asset recovery and the fight against corruption", but, he notes, "there is no marriage between what the law says and what happens in practice".
Bangula Quemba, who says she has no expectations about the future reflexes of the process of combating corruption and asset recovery and defends, on the other hand, the observance of "transparency, credibility and legality" in these processes.
"They are fundamental principles and I see that in fact we have this big problem, is that there is a lot of talk about fighting corruption, the recovery of assets, but this process has not been conducted according to what the law establishes," he noted.
"I don't know of any media process of asset recovery that has resulted from a court decision that has been sentenced and passed in trial. What there have been are seizures, seizures of assets and then it is publicly reported that assets have been recovered," he noted.
The President, João Lourenço, estimated the damage caused to the state by the policy of squandering public funds in recent times at around 24 billion dollars.
The figure, which results from the asset investigation processes underway at the National Asset Recovery Service of the Attorney General's Office (PGR), was revealed by João Lourenço in an interview granted by e-mail to the US daily Wall Sreet Journal, the first part of which was published on Sunday and also deserved a press release from the Presidency of the Republic.
Regarding the President's recent revelations, the lawyer from the law firm Legislacao Veritas says he doesn't see much news except for the issue of numbers, advocating "greater transparency".
"Because any process to fight corruption and even to recover assets always presupposes the observance of fundamental rules and principles, such as credibility and transparency, and I see that the speeches and the numbers that are presented do not have the transparency that would be required," he said.
Bangula Quemba also asks for "clarity" of the values of real estate and furniture seized and/or seized by the State, and questions the fate of the approximately 2.7 billion dollars already recovered by the State, according to João Lourenço.
"The question that arises is where is this amount, specifically, and it is necessary to provide this information to the taxpayer, who is the citizen, who in the end is the biggest loser in this," he said, adding: "If this money was recovered it was necessary to say the end that it will be used and not only present in the global".
"The normal would be to say its application so that the citizen knows, because the fate of everything that is recovered is also one of the fundamental steps of any process of asset recovery," he said.
João Lourenço also said, in this interview with the Wall Street Journal, that the National Asset Recovery Service of PGR has requested its counterparts outside the country to seize or forfeit assets and money, worth about 5.4 billion dollars, particularly in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Monaco and the United Kingdom, "a list that tends to expand," he said.
