Reporters of Zim Daily News have named Speaker of Parliament Emmerson Mnagagwa as the richest politician in Zimbabwe although his official salary is very little. His official source of income is said to be his $17 336 136 annual salary as Speaker of the House. It is reported that he also gets $22 980 representation allowances monthly. This money is said to be too little to sustain him and his family.
--> As a result Mnangagwa is involved in various business activities. He is into farming and has been involved in mining, particular in the DRC. He was personally involved in the Zimbabwean army's mining deals with Congo-based holding company, JFPI Corporation. But there are a lot of illicit activities he has been linked to such as illegal gold panning and DRC blood diamonds. The United Nations Security Council reports in 2002 and 2003 named Mnangagwa as one of the illegal mineral exploiters in the Congo. Mnangagwa and Thamer Said Ahmed Al Shanfari, were both immediately in the spotlight of a long-standing United Nations investigation into the looting of the Congo's mineral wealth. Mnangagwa is Mugabe's crony in chief: one of his closest confidant, the key man in Zimbabwe's Central Intelligence Organisation, the secret police, ever since independence, and the man with whose blessing almost any crime may be committed in Zimbabwe with impunity. Al Shanfari, Mnangagawa's crony, is an Omani entrepreneur described in a secret South African intelligence document obtained by Zimdaily as "the Zimbabweans' most important foreign business partner". According to the Intelligence report, Mnangagwa, known in Zimbabwe as "the Son of God" because of the general supposition that he was Mugabe's anointed successor, is the man illegal cash and diamonds through Harare Airport. Shanfari, the playboy son of a former Omani oil minister, is the man who started the ball rolling by buying the business class tickets and arranging the transfer of the large sums of cash from Europe on which the commercial transactions in the Congo depend. Shanfari is the president and chief executive officer of a company called Oryx Natural Resources that owns a diamond concession in Mbuji-Mayi, in the Congo, jointly with JFPI Corporation, the governments of Zimbabwe and the Congo. Ali, more hands-on in his dealings with Mnangagwa and Shanfari , recalls how three different individuals paid by Shanfari would take it in turns to pick up sums ranging from 500,000 to 750,000 US dollars in cash from a bank account in London and a bank account in Brussels, both in the Oryx company name. The money itself did not belong to Oryx (a company whose auditors are the same as Enron's, Arthur Andersen) but to at least three Arab business associates of Shanfari's. One of them was a Lebanese diamond dealer; one an Iraqi arms dealer; one a Sudanese businessman who had been involved in the bankruptcy scandal of the Abu Dhabi-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in 1992. Ali and Moses said they knew personally, from first-hand evidence, of ten such trips, involving a total of around five million dollars. "But we know there were many more of these missions, even though we were not directly involved," they said. Shanfari's couriers, ex-soldiers who could be relied upon to obey and follow orders, would catch a plane at Gatwick Airport ("there was no problem with the x-ray machine: money just shows up as ordinary paper"), take their business class seats and fly south to Harare, where - thanks to Mnangagwa and the complicity of the Zimbabwean military - they would breeze through customs. "The money would then be distributed in various ways," said Ali, who says he saw much of what happened with his own eyes. "Part of it would go to the PLO Embassy in Harare. The ambassador was a very nice man. As well as being the longest-serving diplomat in Harare - his car's number plate was CD1 - he was a foreign exchange dealer. He gave us Zimbabwean dollars in return for the US, lots of them, in big cardboard boxes." Large chunks of this money would then go to Emmerson Mnangagwa. "Emmerson would get a cut after every trip. What would happen would be that Emmerson would come round to Thamer's house for a barbecue or a dinner, he has a huge ranch house outside Harare, and while they were eating one of Thamer's trusted people would put two or three of these cardboard boxes stuffed with money into the boot of Emmerson's car." Another of the beneficiaries of Shanfari's largesse was Mugabe's young wife, Grace, a woman who has acquired a reputation as something of an African Imelda Marcos on account of her profligate spending down the years in the shops of London, New York, Madrid and other western capitals which she has visited in recent years, usually flying Air Zimbabwe, a state airline which the Mugabes have a habit of comandeering for their own private use. Ali and Moses said they were aware of boxes of money having been delivered by car to the First Lady at her home. A third beneficiary was General Vitalis Zvinavashe, head of the Zimbabwean armed forces, famous for having uttered the following memorable line last March on the eve of Zimbabwe's flagrantly stolen elections, "Any change designed to reverse the gains of this revolution will not be supported."
Another individual who received cash hand-outs from Shanfari was Sydney Sekeramayi, Mnangagwa's most serious rival to take over as president eventually from Mugabe. Sekeremayi, wrote a letter to Shanfari dated 7 July 2000 when he was Minister of State Security in the President's Office, meaning head of intelligence, thanking him for monies received. Elections had just taken place in Zimbabwe and Sekeramayi had retained his parliamentary seat. The letter, carries an official Zimbabwean government letter head and contains Sekeremayi's signature at the bottom. It reads: "Dear Mr Thamer Al-Shanfari, I am writing this letter to express my sincere appreciation for the generous moral, material and financial assistance you rendered to boost my election campaign. My re-election as the Member of Parliament for Marondera East was greatly facilitated by your support. Thank you very much. Dr S.T. Sekeremayi."On planes provided by a company called Avient, of which the ZANU-PF treasurer and close Mugabe associate J.C. Joshi is a director that also had a side-line supplying Antonov aircraft and Ukrainian pilots to the Congo military.
