Key senior members of the Zimbabwe government are to be investigated by the United Nations for allegedly looting and illegally exploiting natural resources, including a fortune in diamonds, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to UN sources in Nairobi, investigators are to travel to Harare within days, where they will question, among others, the Speaker of the Zimbabwean parliament and former National Security Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa - the man widely tipped as a possible successor to Bob President Robert Mugabe. Mnangagwa was identified in a UN report on the looting of Congo, released in October last year, as the "key strategist" for the Zimbabwean branch of an elite network that benefited from a variety of criminal activities in Congo, including theft, embezzlement and the diversion of public funds, undervaluation of goods, smuggling, false invoicing, nonpayment of taxes, kickbacks to public officials and outright bribery.
| Cheeze. They were blatant enough that the UN noticed? Amazing! |
Mnangagwa told the Sunday Times he was unaware of any investigation into his affairs while he served as chairman of a joint committee of ministers responsible for the war-torn Congo. He also denied that UN investigators had written to him or otherwise contacted him with their questions. "But let them come," he said. "That report is full of lies. They had better come now and talk to us."
The UN document — titled The Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of DR Congo — details how this "elite network" benefited from instability in Congo and sought to fuel that instability by supporting armed groups opposed to Rwanda and Burundi. "The elite network of Congolese and Zimbabwean political, military and commercial interests seeks to maintain its grip on the main mineral resources — diamonds, cobalt, copper, germanium — of the government-controlled area," the document says. "This network has transferred ownership of at least 5-billion of assets from the state mining sector to private companies under its control in the past three years with no compensation or benefit for the state treasury." The document identifies Mnangagwa's key ally as Zimbabwe Defence Force commander General Vitalis Zvinavashe, and names several other key ZDF figures as being involved.
| Do you get the idea that getting rid of Bob isn't going to solve the problem? |
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