According to "Zambeze" journalist Luis Nhachote, a businessman of Pakistani origin, Mohamed Macsud Ayoob, on Wednesday sent his employees to the printing company Cegraf to buy all the copies of this week's issue of the paper before it could hit the streets. They then scoured the streets of Maputo looking for any copies that had escaped and were in the hands of street sellers.
"Zambeze" claims a print run of 10,000, and has a cover price of 20 meticais. Buying the entire print run would cost 200,000 meticais (about 8,300 US dollars). Apparently such sums are not a problem for Macsud Ayoob.
The laws of supply and demand then kicked in. Realising that this week's edition of the paper had suddenly become extremely rare, the street sellers asked more money for the few copies that had escaped Macsud's men. According to Nhachote, on Thursday the paper was being sold for prices of up to 100 meticais each. "Zambeze" reacted to the sudden demand just by printing more copies, and by Friday morning it was back on the streets.
It was assumed that Macsud wanted to stop people reading the paper because he features heavily in it. "Zambeze" has been running a series of articles on drug trafficking in Mozambique, and accuses Macsud Ayoob of involvement.
While many "Zambeze" stories have just been part of a right-wing political agenda, bearing no relation to reality (such as the absurd claim that Mozambican Prime Minister Luisa Diogo is not really Mozambican at all, or a long running defamatory campaign against Attorney-General Augusto Paulino), Nhachote's reporting on the Ayoob family is in quite a different category.
For Maqsud Ayoob has been in the papers before. He hit the headlines in March 2002 when he was caught at Maputo International Airport trying to smuggle over a million dollars in cash out of the country. This was in itself an offence, since the maximum anyone is allowed to take out of the country without authorisation from the Bank of Mozambique is 5,000 dollars.
But the interesting question is not the infringement of currency rules, but how did a relatively young businessman such as Maqsud acquire such a large sum in banknotes?
The customs service deposited the money with the Bank of Mozambique. Macsud was detained for 90 days, and then released on bail equivalent to 32,000 dollars. The case has never come to court, and Maqsud still operates out of the company "Modas Niza", though he is no longer listed as one of its owners.
Nhachote's investigations showed that a decade earlier Maqsud was arrested in Portugal on charges of drug trafficking, and spent 210 days in jail. A man named Rafik Suleimane was arrested at Lisbon airport in July 1990 in possession of two kilos of heroin. He told police that the drug came from Mozambique and had been given to him by Omar Faruk Ayoob, and was to be delivered to Mohamed Maqsud Ayoob (who was only 19 years old at the time).
The Portuguese police allowed Suleimane to make the delivery, and so were able to arrest Maqsud as well. When the case came to court in February 1991, Suleimane changed his story, and said he had no idea that there were drugs in the suitcase. That was also Maqsud's defence, and the court acquitted them, much to the annoyance of the Portuguese prosecutors.
With the unsavoury details of his past splashed across the centre pages, it's hardly surprising that Maqsud did not want people to read the paper. But it was a singularly foolish ploy - it merely poured money into "Zambeze"'s coffers, and ensured that eventually many more people would read this edition.
And it might awaken the interest of the public prosecutor's office, now under more dynamic leadership than in 2002. It is not too late for prosecutors to ask Maqsud where that million dollars came from.