Zimbabwe’s Criminal Cabal
Hitler, the Arab Playboy and the Son of God

15^th October 2002

PART ONE

In order to transport half a million dollars in unlaundered cash safely from one country to another there are two basic requirements. First, you must possess a business class ticket, because the weight of half a million dollars exceeds the the hand luggage limit on Economy. Second, you must disembark at an airport where customs officials may be relied upon not to ask questions.

Harare International Airport has provided precisely such facilities in recent years; foreign associates of the Zimbabwean government have provided the business class tickets and the millions in cash. Once inside Zimbabwe, the money has been employed, among other things, to pay off senior government officials and others close to President Robert Mugabe; to engage in currency exchange rackets; and, abetted by the military and other elements in the Zimbabwean state apparatus, to purchase "blood diamonds" in the war zones of the Congo.

In tracking the trail of the cash, El Pais has obtained dozens of documents, including three signed affidavits, and spoken to the investigation has centred chiefly on the testimony of two individuals who worked closely for more than two years within an elite clique of Zimbabweans and foreign business people who have been making big money out of the mayhem of war.

The two individuals' story reveals the corrupt schemings of Robert Mugabe's inner circle and reinforces the perception, held by the European Union and the United States among others, that Mugabe is the leader not so much of a national government as of a small gang that has spent the last four years getting rich thanks to a war that has cost more than two million lives in the Congo; that deems its own survival to be of more pressing urgency than the impending death by famine, as the United Nations has warned, of six million Zimbabweans.

In conversations El País held in Washington that ranged from Congress to the State Department to the Pentagon and in London with officials of the government and members of the House of Lords, the words that kept on recurring to describe Zimbabwe's ruling elite were "mafia", "pillage" and "criminal".

The consensus, summed up by one congressional staffer in Washington, was that the Zimbabwean government was "a criminal organisation run for the benefit of Mugabe and his cronies". "Mugabe always was power-hungry, but not - I thought - corrupt. I never imagined he would end up presiding over the most corrupt regime in Africa," said Robin Renwick, one of the chief architects of the Lancaster House agreement which gave independence to Zimbabwe and, as it turned out, uninterrupted power to Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party for the last 22 years. Lord Renwick, later British ambassador in South Africa and Washington, has been one of the more vocal proponents of an EU visa ban and assets freeze imposed this year on Mugabe and 71 of his associates.

Russ Feingold, the Democrat who chairs the US Senate's Sub-Committee on Africa, has pushed for similar sanctions in Washington. Senator Feingold, who has met with members of Mugabe's inner circle, said that Zimbabwe's "elites" had "strong incentives to retain power regardless of the cost to the country as a whole"; that it was dificult to avoid the conclusion "that public office is being used almost solely for private gain". Or, as Renwick more bluntly put it, "the Zimbawean army has been rented out in the Congo for the benefit of Mugabe and the mafia around him".

Ed Royce, the Republican who heads the House of Representatives' Africa sub-committee, is outraged by what he calls Mugabe's use of "food as a weapon", deliberately "starving people" his political opponents. The judiciary is neutered, the press is gagged (North Korea-style, no foreign press are allowed in Zimbabwe today) and meanwhile, Royce said, "Mugabe's cronies live high by pillaging the Democratic Republic of Congo".

Walter Kansteiner, the US assistant secretary of state for Africa, spoke of the man-made "tragedy" of Zimbabwe when he spoke to el País. Traditionally an exporter of food, a country with a solid infrastructure and one of the highest educational standards in Africa, Zimbabwe had been a beacon of light in a dark continent. It had emerged, in Kansteiner's word, "from a harsh colonial past into a country that clearly valued democratic tradition". Not any more, said Kansteiner, who - choosing his words diplomatically - described the business deals the Mugabe regime now engaged in as a "a little bit murky".

The revelations of the two individuals from inside the Zimbabwean "mafia" who spoke to el Pais, in conversations held in London and Marbella, help reveal the depths of the Zimbabean tragedy and shed new light on the murk; on a state-sanctioned criminal network whose accomplices and interests extend from Africa to Europe and the Middle East. The two spoke on condition of anonymity because they said they feared that if their names were published they, or their wives and children, might be killed.

Because of their very real concerns, the two sources shall be known in this article as - choosing two names entirely at random - Ali and Moses. The story they tell has two protagonists, Emmerson Mnangagwa and Thamer Said Ahmed Al Shanfari, both of whom have been in the spotlight of a long-standing United Nations investigation into the looting of the Congo's mineral wealth.

Mnangagwa is Mugabe's crony in chief: his closest confidant, the key man in Zimbabwe's Central Intelligence Organisation, the secret police, ever since independence, and the man with whose blessing almost any crime may be committed in Zimbabwe with impunity.

Al Shanfari, Mnangagawa's crony, is an Omani entrepreneur described in a secret South African intelligence document obtained by El País as "the Zimbabweans' most important foreign business partner". Mnangagwa, known in Zimbabwe as "the Son of God" because of the general supposition that he is Mugabe's anointed successor, is the man illegal cash and diamonds through Harare Airport.

Shanfari, the playboy son of a former Omani oil minister, is the man who starts the ball rolling by buying the business class tickets and arranging the transfer of the large sums of cash from Europe on which the commercial transactions in the Congo depend. Shanfari is the president and chief executive officer of a company called Oryx Natural Resources that owns a diamond concession in Mbuji-Mayi, in the Congo, jointly with the governments of Zimbabwe and the Congo.

Ali, more hands-on in his dealings with Mnangagwa and Shanfari than Moses, recalls how three different individuals paid by Shanfari would take it in turns to pick up sums ranging from 500,000 to 750,000 US dollars in cash from a bank account in London and a bank account in Brussels, both in the Oryx company name. The money itself did not belong to Oryx (a company whose auditors are the same as Enron's, Arthur Andersen) but to at least three Arab business associates of Shanfari's.

One of them was a Lebanese diamond dealer; one an Iraqi arms dealer; one a Sudanese businessman who had been involved in the bankruptcy scandal of the Abu Dhabi-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in 1992. Ali and Moses said they knew personally, from first-hand evidence, of ten such trips, involving a total of around five million dollars. "But we know there were many more of these missions, even though we were not directly involved," they said.

Shanfari's couriers, ex-soldiers who could be relied upon to obey and follow orders, would catch a plane at Gatwick Airport ("there was no problem with the x-ray machine: money just shows up as ordinary paper"), take their business class seats and fly south to Harare, where - thanks to Mnangagwa and the complicity of the Zimbabwean military -- they would breeze through customs. "The money would then be distributed in various ways," said Ali, who says he saw much of what happened with his own eyes. "Part of it would go to the PLO Embassy in Harare. The ambassador was a very nice man. As well as being the longest-serving diplomat in Harare - his car's number plate was CD1 - he was a foreign exchange dealer. He gave us Zimbabwean dollars in return for the US, lots of them, in big cardboard boxes."

Large chunks of this money would then go to Emmerson Mnangagwa. "Emmerson would get a cut after every trip. What would happen would be that Emmerson would come round to Thamer's house for a barbecue or a dinner, he has a huge ranch house outside Harare, and while they were eating one of Thamer's trusted people would put two or three of these cardboard boxes stuffed with money into the boot of Emmerson's car."

Another of the beneficiaries of Shanfari's largesse was Mugabe's young wife, Grace, a woman who has acquired a reputation as something of an African Imelda Marcos on account of her profligate spending down the years in the shops of London, New York, Madrid and other western capitals which she has visited in recent years, usually flying Air Zimbabwe, a state airline which the Mugabes have a habit of comandeering for their own private use.

Ali and Moses said they were aware of boxes of money having been delivered by car to the First Lady at her home. A third beneficiary was General Vitalis Zvinavashe, head of the Zimbabwean armed forces, famous for having uttered the following memorable line last March on the eve of Zimbabwe's flagrantly stolen elections, "Any change designed to reverse the gains of this revolution will not be supported."

Another individual who received cash hand-outs from Shanfari was Sydney Sekeramayi, Mnangagwa's most serious rival to take over as president eventually from Mugabe. Sekeremayi, today minister of mines and energy, wrote a letter to Shanfari dated 7 July 2000 when he was Minister of State Security in the President's Office, meaning head of intelligence, thanking him for monies received.

Elections had just taken place in Zimbabwe and Sekeramayi had retained his parliamentary seat. The letter, a copy of which has been obtained by El País, carries an official Zimbabwean government letter head and contains Sekeremayi's signature at the bottom. It reads: "Dear Mr Thamer Al-Shanfari, I am writing this letter to express my sincere appreciation for the generous moral, material and financial assistance you rendered to boost my election campaign. My re-election as the Member of Parliament for Marondera East was greatly facilitated by your support. Thank you very much. Dr S.T. Sekeremayi."

The crucial cogs in the state apparatus having been duly oiled (Moses calculates that Mugabe's people took between 10 and 20 per cent of the cash that arrived on the flights from London Gatwick), the remaining money set off into Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On planes provided by a company called Avient, of which the ZANU-PF treasurer and close Mugabe associate J.C. Joshi is a director that also had a side-line supplying Antonov aircraft and Ukrainian pilots to the Congo military.

Mnangagwa, who did business deals with his Congo counterparts, saw to it that there would be no awkward questions asked by the customs men at Kinshasa airport. "The procedure was quite straightfoward," Moses explained. "We'd meet with a guy called Alphonse in Kinshasa, a Belgian diamond dealer, and we gave him US dollars for uncut stones that had been extracted in the Congo's big diamond area Mbuji-Mayi. Then we'd go back to Harare with the diamonds and from there we'd take them down to South Africa to have them cut. That was the tricky part."

A couple of individuals who Ali and Moses know very well and who were employed by Shanfari transported the diamonds to Johannesburg in their underpants. "Enough diamonds to fill a tea cup," said Moses. "Easily half a million to a million US worth on each trip." Once the stones had made it through Johannesburg airport the rest was easy. "We got the diamonds back into Harare - never a problem because we had the infrastructure of the military to assist us and of course carte blanche in the airport itself. From there the diamonds, certified as if they hade been extracted legally from a mine owned by Oryx, travelled on to Antwerp where they were sold legally.

The people who put the money into the system in the first place got the same amount back, but now certified by the Antwerp diamond buyer as having clean provenance. It was pure money-laundering. Everybody was happy. Thamer's Arab friends had achieved their objectives. Thamer took a big cut. Emmerson and the others made easy money." Sometimes, though, Shanfari tried to get a little too clever, according to Ali and Moses. "It worked beautifully, until the day that it didn't." This is what would happen.

The US dollars would travel from Harare to Kinshasa but not, initially, to buy diamonds. To be changed, rather, into Congolese Francs. At the office of an associate of Shanfari's called Akram that Ali describes as having been "just full of foreign currencies". Akram was Akram Moorad, nephew of the lebanese diamond dealer who was among Shanfaris cash suppliers in Europe. "Thamer called the Congolese Francs 'chicken feed'," recalled Ali. "There was tons of the stuff, loaded inside big silver containers, that we'd take back to Harare. Later, in the dead of night, we'd load the boxes onto a Lybian plane - a private plane in from Tripoli, at Harare airport which would take the money to Kisangani, which was the heart of rebel country in the Congo war. Here they desperately needed Congolese Francs."

Congolese Francs are the local currency but cash has been hard to obtain. The distance between the capital Kinsahasa and Kisangani is more than 700 miles. In war-time getting from one place to the other has proved almost impossible. Getting US dollars presented less of a challenge, because they could be shipped across Congo's borders with two countries friendly to the Kisangani rebels, Uganda and Rwanda. So they bought Thamer's Congolese Francs in US dollars, "Ali continued, "but Thamer got back double the rate he'd sold them at in Kinshasa. Double!"

It was a great business, (though there are suggestions now that some of the dollars received might have been forged). But it was risky. "Because if either the Zimbabweans or the Congolese found out the money was going to those they were actually at war with, there would be hell to pay for Thamer." As far as the Zimbabwe authorities were concerned, Moses explained, the Lybian plane was taking the money to Oryx's mine at Mbuji-Mayi, to pay for staff and equipment.

This time there was a cock-up, someone wasn't tipped off on time, and they caught us, Congolese military security, with 750,000 US worth of Congolese Francs on our way back to Harare." An employee of Shanfari's was jailed, as was Patel the Kenya Airways man. Shanfari's employee was released after Mnangagwa intervened directly on his behalf with the Congolese justice minister.

Pressure is increasing almost by the day from every corner of the world for "regime change" in Zimbabwe, for the termination of a Mugabe autocracy perceived to be so criminal and illegitimate that even Nelson Mandela has called on Zimbabweans to rise up and overthrow it by force of arms.

Only last Tuesday as Mandela's good friend former US president Bill Clinton was speaking out in Nigeria against the election-rigging and intimidation of political opponents in Zimbabwe, a senior United Nations human rights investigator from Malaysia, Param Cumaraswamy, denounced Mugabe's "systematic attack on the rule of law". Three days later the prime minister of Australia, John Howard, announced his government would examine imposing "targeted sanctions" against Zimbabwe, in the manner of the US, that since February prohibits entry to top Zimbabwean officials, and the European Union which so far this year has imposed visa bans and asset freezes on 72 members of the Mugabe regime.

In both the US and Europe moves are afoot to shut off a possible leak in the sanctions system by extending it to include people who do business with Zimbabwe. As Lord Renwick, a former British ambassador to South Africa and the US and one of Mugabe's most vocal critics, told El País: "In order to put more pressure on Mugabe you must obviously tie up his associates - among other things, by freezing their assets."

The Mugabe regime's leading foreign business partner, Oryx Natural Resources, is not yet on any sanctions list, although when the company sought to list itself last year on the London Stock Exchange it was turned down. As the Sunday Times wrote at the time, "The bid to float Oryx sits uncomfortably with a campaign by the British government to organise an international ban on sales of 'blood diamonds' from conflict areas".

PART TWO

Yesterday's El Pais, in the first of a two-part series on Zimbabwe's "mafia state", made a list of allegations against Oryx and its chairman, Omani businessman Thamer Said Ahmed Al Shanfari, based on detailed testimony from two individuals closely involved with the affairs of Oryx and the Zimbabwean government. Oryx has contacted El Pais and declared the allegations to be "completely untrue".

The allegations, in essence, are that the company made cash payments to senior members of the Zimbabwean government or individuals otherwise close to President Robert Mugabe; bought "blood" or "conflict" diamonds in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in some cases smuggled them abroad, among other places to Belgium, where they were eventually sold, passed off as having been extracted from a mining concession that Oryx shares with the Zimbabwean government in the diamond-rich Congo area of Mbuji Mayi.

"I refute all the allegations," said Geoffrey White, who together with a company lawyer in London has been responding in the last two days, by fax and by telephone, to issues raised by El País. "This is rubbish," Mr White said, adding that he believed that El País had fallen victim to an elaborate hoax. He said that two ex-employees of Oryx, "frauds" "driven by revenge" against the company, which they believed owed them money, had been spreading malicious lies. In a letter faxed later, Oryx's London lawyer, Mischon de Reya, said the allegations against his client were "grossly defamatory".

The lawyer wrote that, according to Mr White, the people he believed to be the sources for the El País investigation were "motivated by extreme malice towards Oryx Natural Resources" and were "trying to defraud" the company's owner, Thamer Al Shanfari. These two individuals whom Mr White believes to be the sources on which el País is relying are not named in the letter but, according to Mischon de Reya, had "made threats to kill both Thamer Al Shanfari and Geoffrey White". By contrast, Mr White declared in the first of his faxed responses to El País, received on Friday, "The Oryx Group prides itself on conducting itself with honesty and integrity."

The Oryx Group first became involved with the Mugabe regime four years ago. Everything flowed from a proposal President Laurent Kabila of the Congo made to Mugabe in 1998. Facing heavy military pressure from rebel armies backed by Uganda and Rwanda, Kabila proposed to Mugabe that he would give him access to a diamond concession in the Congo valued at one billion dollars, the concession in Mbuji Mayi, in exchange for the loan of his army. Mugabe readily agreed to the diamonds-for-soldiers deal but what he did not have was the technical or commercial expertise to extract the diamonds.

Enter Kamal Khalfan, a weapons dealer, Oryx shareholder and old Harare resident who rejoiced in the title of honorary consul of Oman in Zimbabwe. Khalfan suggested to Mugabe that Shanfari might be just the partner he needed. Shanfari, a 34-year-old graduate of the Colorado School of Mines who comes from a lavishly wealthy and influential Omani family, flew to Harare and met Mugabe.

A company was created, a joint venture between Shanfari's Oryx, a company called Osleg (the business wing of the Zimbabwean armed forces) and a third co-signatory to the agreement, dated 16 July 1999, "the government of the Republic of Zimbabwe", meaning the clique who ran Zanu PF. Osleg already had a partnership agreement with Congo's Comiex, a private company linked to the Presidency in Kinshasa. Under the terms of the agreement with Osleg, Oryx would run the diamond mining enterprise in Mbuji Mayi and take 40 per cent of the profits. The problem, Oryx was to find, was that, owing to the war and the logistical problems presented by the Congo's poverty and its vastness, the diamond concession of Mbuji-Mayi was not producing diamonds on a scale remotely proportionate to its one billion dollar valuation.

Individuals who have worked on the mine have said in recent weeks that the quantities of diamonds mined have been minimal. One source familiar with a United Nations investigation going on now into the looting of the Congo's mineral wealth maintained that the Oryx mine was generating little more than 100,000 US dollars worth of diamonds per month. "That's nothing in the diamond business," the source said. A senior congressional staffer in Washington who closely monitors events in Zimbabwe and the Congo made a similar point: "No one has been able to make money out of Congo diamond mining yet and so no reason to believe the Zimbabweans and their foreign partners were going to. The whole business is a bust, save as a cover for other stuff."

Other stuff, such as trading in "blood diamonds" at a time of war and mass starvation, which has enriched a group of no more than a dozen Zimbabwean individuals notable among whom have been Mr and Mrs Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa, identified by the UN, the EU and the US as prime beneficiaries of the Congo-Zimbabwe apocalypse In the case of Mnangagwa, known in Zimbabwe these days as "chief executive" of the Congo as well as "Son of God" (because of the general assumption that he is Mugabe's chosen successor) , the wonder is that no one has put him on a sanctions list sooner. Or perhaps tried him for war crimes.

Mnangagwa, who is 56, was minister of state security and head of the secret police at the time of the notorious Matabeleland massacres of 1983, in which the Zimbabwean army's North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade killed more than 10,000 innocent civilians inhabiting a region of Zimbabwe considered to be opposed to Mugabe. Mnangagwa, identified by human rights groups as the man who organised the massacres, was rewarded by Mugabe with the job of justice minister, a job he kept for 12 years. Mnangagwa, whom diplomats in southern Africa believe to have been the vote-rigger-in-chief in the presidential elections held in March this year, was described in a United Nations Security Council report put out at the end of last year as "the architect of the commercial activities of Zanu PF" (Zimbabwe's ruling party) and the prime mover behind the illicit diamond trading in the Congo.

Mnangagwa, identified by El País sources as Shanfari's closest associate in the Congo diamond partnership, has been a regular guest of honour at large dinners that Shanfari has hosted at his Harare home. Another guest, the sources claimed, used to be Chenjerai Hunzvi, better known by his chosen nickname "Hitler".

Hitler, who died a year ago of natural causes, rose to prominence four years ago as the man who led the invasions of Zimbabwe's white-owned farms. Under the protection of, among others, Mnangagwa when he was justice minister, Hitler would encourage his storm troopers to rob and commit murder safe in the knowledge there would be no legal consequences.

It was in such a climate, in such a country, with such people, that Oryx's Mr Shanfari has judged the circumstances propitious during the last four years to do business. His number two at Oryx, Geoffrey White, says the company is proud of its "honesty and integrity". Yet, as the top foreign business associate of what Nelson Mandela has called the Mugabe tyranny, he can deny all the allegations that he wishes but he cannot deny that he is an accomplice of a small power clique that uses food as a weapon to starve its political opponents, that murders and tortures political rivals with impunity, that steals elections, that has profited from a savage war in the Congo, that sets the perpetuation of its own power and wealth above the welfare of the six million Zimbabweans that today are facing famine, that has destroyed its own country and has blood all over its hands.

By John Carlin - El Pais (Spain)