Africa: "Unravelling a US-sanctioned magnate’s links to a complex mining and trading empire"

 A couple very interesting posts at FT Alphaville earlier on Friday.

First up was a discussion with Jim Chanos at Twitter Spaces.

I am not a user of Twitter, preferring to look like a damn fool in the extended format of the Blogger platform rather than being limited to 280 characters.

So here's hoping Alphaville's Editor and tech support figure out a way to generate transcripts or record the Twitter Spaces content

And second up, The FT's man in southern Africa (and Alphaville alum) Joseph Cotterill with the headline story: 

The offshore hive of Zimbabwe’s ‘Queen Bee’

As the ruthless, army-backed successor to Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa is known as the crocodile. And yet the best symbol of how hopes for a better Zimbabwe have faded since the 2017 coup against Mugabe is, in many ways, a bee. After he took power, Mnangagwa promised to make Zimbabwe “open for business” and to end systematic corruption that obliterated the economy under the late dictator. 

But for many ordinary Zimbabweans, his regime has become associated instead with a ‘Queen Bee’ - Kudakwashe Tagwirei, a business magnate in the southern African nation who has gained the moniker because of his perceived element of control over Mnangagwa’s government and ruling Zanu-PF that allegedly benefits his commercial interests.

Tagwirei owns Sakunda, a fuel importer that until last year had a joint venture with Trafigura, the global trader. He has maintained a public silence on the claims against him and the true extent of these alleged interests has been a mystery. Until now.

Tagwirei secretly controlled an offshore empire that bought up a major share of the southern African nation’s mineral wealth and funnelled millions of dollars through shell companies, according to documents including a court filing seen by FT Alphaville.

Tagwirei, according to the documents, directed Sotic International, a Mauritius-based commodity trader that went on a mine-buying spree in Zimbabwe in the last two years, and a web of related companies across three countries. Tagwirei did not respond to requests for comment. On Thursday, the Sentry, the US investigative anti-corruption NGO, also released a report on Tagwirei’s business activities.

Last year the US imposed sanctions on Tagwirei and accused him in a statement of using “a combination of opaque business dealings and his ongoing relationship with President Mnangagwa to grow his business empire dramatically.” The sanctions also targeted Sakunda as the company most closely tied to Tagwirei. But documents seen by AV indicate that Tagwirei’s corporate reach goes much further. 

A complex web....

....MUCH MORE

If interested, I went off on a Cotterill ramble in "Questions the Irish Are Asking: "Are the English ready for self-government?"" including a link to a post titled This Cotterill Fellow Is First Rate and another where he beat up on Nassim Taleb.