TWO prominent businesspeople with suspected links to President Robert Mugabe have been fingered in the ongoing international financial fall-out over what has become known as the Panama Papers.
BY RICHARD CHIDZA
The Panama Papers are a series of confidential financial information leaks held by Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca and Mugabe is named as having allegedly benefited through Zanu PF-linked business tycoons John Bredenkamp and Billy Rautenbach.
According to reports, in 2009 Mossack Fonseca ended its relationship with Bredenkamp allegedly after revelations of his links with Mugabe.
“Bredenkamp, on the firm’s books since 1997, had been described in 2002 by a United Nations expert panel as ‘experienced in setting up clandestine companies and sanctions-busting operations’.
“In 2008, months before Mossack Fonseca cut ties, Bredenkamp was sanctioned by OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control, a financial intelligence and enforcement agency of the US government charged with planning and execution of economic and trade sanctions in support of US national security and foreign policy objectives) for allegedly being a ‘crony’ of Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe and a well-known Mugabe insider,” media reports quoting the papers claimed.
Mugabe, at the height of his political confrontation with Western countries and in the aftermath of the imposition of sanction by the European Union and the US, challenged his accusers to bring evidence that he owned anything outside Zimbabwe.
Bredenkamp has consistently denied allegations linking him and his business ventures to Mugabe. In 2012, Bredenkamp successfully overturned European Union sanctions against him and his companies.
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But, according to the Panama Papers: “One company, Tremalt Limited, purchased equipment for armies in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Nations alleged. It took seven years before a Mossack Fonseca employee reported internally that an Internet search implicated a separate company the law firm said was owned by Bredenkamp in a series of allegations concerning arms deals.”
Another government-linked business magnet, Rautenbach, has also been fingered in the reports and described in the documents as one of Mugabe’s “alleged bagmen”.
Other leaders named in the leaks include Yulia Tymoshenko, “a former Ukrainian Prime Minister and oligarch nicknamed the ‘gas princess’; Beny Steinmetz, an Israeli billionaire who had reportedly used a Mossack Fonseca-incorporated shell firm in the British Virgin Islands to pay a bribe to a wife of the homicidal dictator of Guinea, where Steinmetz was seeking (and subsequently got) a huge mining concession”.
Eleven million documents were leaked from one of the world’s most secretive companies, Mossack Fonseca.
The leaks also detail the offshore activities of family members and associates of former Chinese Premier Li Peng, Egypt’s former President Hosni Mubarak, and former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, among many other oligarchs across the world.
