Zimbabwe Minister of Finance, Chris Kuruneri, who is building a R30-million mansion in one of Cape Town’s most affluent areas, was arrested on Saturday on allegations of dealing illegally in about $1-million in foreign currency, police confirmed.
Spokesperson Senior Assistant Commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena said Kuruneri was arrested at about 8am by a team of detectives on charges under exchange control laws, for failing to repatriate hard currency earnings.
”He will appear in court soon,” Bvudzihjena said, but until then Kuruneri will remain in police custody.
Kuruneri, who was appointed finance minister in February, is the most senior government official to have been arrested since President Robert Mugabe launched a crackdown on corruption, money laundering, illegal currency dealing and gold smuggling in January.
Speaker of Parliament Emmerson Mnangagwa, who is also the secretary for administration on the ruling-party politburo, making him the fourth in line in the party ranks, is under investigation for alleged involvement in a gold racket, but has not been arrested.
Last month the South African Sunday Times reported that Kuruneri was building an eight-bathroom villa, also equipped with an elevator, in a prime site in Llandudno, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
The newspaper said the minister owned two other properties in Llandudno, and regularly appeared, waving large bundles of United States dollars, in the offices of the construction building his mansion.
State radio also reported the arrest, and said a team of detectives has been despatched to South Africa to investigate the minister’s activities there.
”In the drive to end corruption, no one will be too big or too small,” Mugabe said at independence celebrations last week. ”The law is rough with criminals and we shall shed no tears for them.”
Critics have dismissed Mugabe’s anti-corruption campaign as a means to get rid of potential challengers to his rule, now running into a quarter of a century.
They point to the long history of corruption within Zanu-PF, repeatedly deplored by Mugabe, although until now he has taken no action against perpetrators, and has granted amnesty to the handful of senior figures who have been prosecuted.
Observers point out that despite Kuruneri’s senior government position, he is a relative lightweight within the structures of Zanu-PF.
”He was probably an embarrassment,” said a Western diplomat. ”He’s expendable.”
Immediately after the Sunday Times‘s revelations, Kuruneri confirmed he was building the Llandudno mansion, but claimed it was worth only R7-million.
He claimed that the property was being built on hard currency he earned abroad as a consultant for an international mobile phone company trying to establish itself in Malawi and Zambia. The money was earned outside Zimbabwe and he was under no obligation to repatriate it, he said.
”My hands are clean,” the state media quoted him as saying then.
A wealthy businessman who also owns a hotel and casino with Chinese partners just north of Harare, Kuruneri was accused in the 1990s of swindling a state housing company out of millions of Zimbabwe dollars, but the accusations were withdrawn against him.
He became a ruling-party MP in the last parliamentary elections in 2000.
Once one of Africa’s most robust and diverse economies, Zimbabwe has been reduced to a disaster zone after the past four years of brutal repression, lawlessness, the illegal seizure of nearly all the country’s productive white-owned commercial farm land and reckless economic decisions.
Commentators said the collapse of the economy, with gross domestic product plummeting 30% in the past five years, has been marked by the rampant growth of corruption that saw the sudden emergence of a new business class of ostentatiously wealthy ruling-party figures who bought fleets of imported luxury cars and built sumptuous homes on corrupt earnings. — Sapa