New channels

As Britain pushes for tougher European Union sanctions, ZANU (PF) apparatchiks are setting up new routes through Malaysia.

Central to this new arrangement is Mugabe business ally Enoch Kamushinda, who has been living in Malaysia since 2004. Kamushinda recently sold 60% of his shareholding in Metropolitan Bank to the wholly respectable Nairobi-based Loita Capital Partner International. This allowed Kamushinda to open his financial investment firm in Kuala Lumpur ­ where Mugabe holidayed earlier this year. He also which advises the President on his business portfolio.

There are several other companies involved. We hear, former Army Chief General Solomon Mujuru uses a British-registered company to move money through Parlovan Investments, a Harare-based money transfer agency he controls.

Some of these cash exporting businesses are led by high profile foreigners such Nicholas van Hoogstraten. In other cases, the foreigners take on a purely functional role as accountants, private bankers or lawyers. London-based barristers David Oliver QC and Benjamin Shaw ­ instructed by Reed Smith­ are working for a nominee-company representing President Mugabe’s government in Britain, but they are acting entirely within the British law.

Earlier this month, a judge granted AMG Global Nominees an appeal hearing for 3 November in its long-running fight to take control of the London-listed Africa Resources Limited (ARL) and its asbestos mines, owned by Zimbabwean businessman Mutumwa Mawere (AC Vol 49 No 12).

An article on 27 June in Zimbabwe’s daily state mouthpiece The Herald let slip that AMG Global Nominees ‘represents Government [sic] interests’. AMG Administrator Afaras Gwaradzimba, appointed by Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa, said in an interview that AMG had received ‘US$2 million from the Reserve Bank’ in a bid to force Mawere to divest control in ARL. Charles Hewetson, a partner at Reed Smith, told AC that Gwaradzimba was independently appointed and the government’s relationship with AMG was as a creditor to the asbestos mines. – Used with permission from Africa Confidential

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