The charge sheet implicating five businessmen in a R213-million pension-fund fraud details an elaborate scheme aimed at profiteering from surplus money generated by the funds. Four businessmen were arrested last month in a criminal case relating to that being brought against Australian Peter Ghavalas, who was arrested in September last year.
While the government has been putting a lot of energy into tackling import parity pricing as part of its broad-based attack on excessive pricing, there is one major industry in the country — sugar — that continues to use import parity as one of its cornerstones. The industry is finally starting to feel the winds of change … or are they just breezes?
Botswana is struggling to control a diarrhoea epidemic that has claimed the lives of 470 children since January. "A few adult cases have been reported but mostly children are affected," Colo Boitshoko, spokesperson for the Ministry of Health said. "We had a lot of rain for this time of the year."
People getting eaten by wild animals is only one side of the picture in post-war Mozambique — the tourist boom is threatening a number of endangered marine species with local extinction. South African conservation organisations working in Mozambique are particularly worried about sea turtles and dugongs.
Behold, Thabob Mugabeki once again came to that place where he strapped his personal Boeing 737-800 to his bottom and was hurled into welcoming global skies. Soon after the Boeing reached low Earth orbit, Thabob Mugabeki strolled carefully back to his satin-lined boudoir, just aft of the right wing.
Iraq’s embattled Prime Minister, Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, speaks to Jonathan Steele in Baghdad in the leader’s first interview since United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s recent move to break the Iraqi political deadlock.
Lodge owners in a prime coastal resort are pitting the Danish and Mozambican governments against each other in a bitter legal row over who owns a piece of paradise. Jørgen Nielsen, a Danish businessman, ran into trouble in paradise shortly after he bought rights to a piece of land in the Vilanculos Coastal Wildlife Sanctuary in 2001.
Court proceedings are brought to a halt in Harare’s High Court D where two witnesses, flown in from Switzerland, are to testify in a murder case. The recording equipment has malfunctioned and the Justice Ministry is too broke to replace it. The Swiss ambassador to Zimbabwe, leaves the court and returns moments later with a cable — for which he paid R15 — so that the case can proceed.
Iran has been conducting a sort of grand military parade up and down the Gulf this week, displaying its defensive hardware, test-firing sophisticated-sounding new weapons systems, and proclaiming its readiness to repel all would-be aggressors. The commander of the ”Great Prophet” exercises declared that Iran is now able to ”confront any extra-regional invasion”.
”The new millennium must continue to communicate the unequivocal message that — Africa shall be free!” The Mail & Guardian publishes an edited version of the inaugural lecture of the Parliamentary Millennium Project, delivered by President Thabo Mbeki, on the struggle between the Afro-optimists and the Afro-pessimists.