Anjin dismisses $15bn diamonds loot claim

via Anjin dismisses $15bn diamonds loot claim – DailyNews Live Mugove Tafirenyika • 4 April 2016

MUTARE – Chinese diamond mining company, Anjin Investments, says it has no clue on the mysterious disappearance of the $15 billion which President Robert Mugabe claimed was realised from the Chiadzwa fields.

The director of the company, a fifty-fifty joint venture with the government of Zimbabwe, Munyaradzi Machacha told the touring Indigenisation portfolio committee of Parliament that his company had never realised anything close to the amount that Mugabe recently claimed was looted from the fields.

“ We have not had diamonds of that value, maybe government knows better but like we said we never produced such diamonds. We are actually struggling to service our debts so even if it was Anjin being targeted, our overall production does not speak to that figure.”

Machacha said that since the company began its operations they had generated a total revenue of about $324,5 million from the 9 million carats they produced up to 2015.

Out of the total revenue, the company claimed that $78 million went towards taxes and other statutory obligations.

Machacha would not comment on whether the company, that government has since directed to cease operations, would still fulfil its $10 million pledge to the community share ownership trusts in Marange-Zimunya saying he would wait for the outcome of the court application in which Anjin is challenging government decision to stop its operations.

Machacha said the company did not understand the government decision given “what we have done in contributing to the national economy.  It is clear that what is said about us has no basis. There are a lot of things that are said by some people that are not true but are presented as facts. I wish your committee had come earlier maybe you could have saved us but now we are in the intensive care and we are struggling for oxygen hoping we could survive a day longer.”

Anjin, which is run by Chinese nationals, is a joint venture between the government’s Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation and China’s State-owned Anhui Foreign and Economic Construction Company

Mugabe recently made the stunning claim that $15 billion had been looted from Chiadzwa under his government’s watch.