Zimbabwe ‘funding police with diamonds’

ZIMBABWE’S government is using money earned from diamond exports to fund its Central Intelligence Organisation, blamed for a raft of humanrights abuses as it’s helped to keep President Robert Mugabe in power since 1980, Global Witness said.

Diamonds dug from the Marange fields in eastern Zimbabwe are channelled through Dubai, India, the Netherlands and South Africa by a complicated web of cross-owned companies based in places as diverse as Mauritius, Hong Kong and Johannesburg, the Londonbased group said in a report released yesterday. The companies have one thing in common: partnerships with businesses owned by the Zimbabwe government or its military. The earnings, says Global Witness, are funneled back to the CIO and army “off budget”.

In 2011, then-Finance Minister Tendai Biti said government had lost as much as $15 billion in revenue as a result of diamond looting and accused the elite in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African Union-Patriotic Front party of “prospering from the stones”.

“The future of Zimbabwe’s diamonds now hangs in the balance. Dwindling reserves are demanding greater investment from an industry shaped by state-sponsored looting and short-term thinking,” Global Witness said in the report, the first attempt to link a web of companies and individuals who’ve prospered from the Marange fields.

It blames the government, which owns at least 50 percent of the diamond mining companies in Marange and selected each of its partners. “With billions missing, any heist – it is clear – started closer to home,” it says.