From el Pais (Spain)

Hitler, the Arab Playboy and the Son of God

By John Carlin

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 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 experts on Zimbabwe in London, Washington and New York. But 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 difficult to avoid the conclusion "that public office is being used almost solely for private gain". Or, as Renwick more bluntly put it, "the Zimbabwean 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 Zimbabwean 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 who, among other things, guarantees the safe passage of 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 very 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 commandeering 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, "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 Sekeremayi 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 had 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 Shanfari’s 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 Libyan 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 Kinshasa 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!"