The Zimbabwe government sourced foreign currency on the black market to fund ”sensitive” projects to do with ”national security” even as it clamped down on the private sector for doing so, a Mail & Guardian investigation has revealed. President Robert Mugabe’s presidential trips abroad, the procurement of indelible ink from Switzerland prior to the disputed 2002 presidential poll and cash-strapped parastatals benefited from this practice.
”The Central Bank was dry and the only source of income were local banks, which even ended up paying the salaries of diplomats,” a government source told the M&G.
The man who engineered the scheme is the Central Bank Governor Gideon Gono, who was the CE of the Commercial Bank of Zimbabwe (CBZ) at the time.
This came to light in court last week at the high-profile trial of former finance minister Chris Kuruneri, who is facing seven charges of externalising foreign currency.
Gono, who was testifying for the state told the Harare High Court last Friday: ”The bank that I was involved with was at the centre of rescue missions for this country.”
He had arranged for Kuruneri to provide US$500 000 of his personal funds to the CBZ in February 2002. Other commercial banks and influential individuals in the government and the private sector — identities known to the M&G — were allegedly also tapped to raise much-needed foreign exchange.
Kuruneri was the Zanu-PF MP for Mazowe. He was arrested at the residence of Police Commissioner Augustine Chihuri last year.
Gono refused to divulge how Kuruneri’s money was used stating that such information was ”protected under the Official Secrets Act”, but conveyed that he was ”grateful” for his assistance.
According to Gono’s testimony, it ”saved the country from a potential national catastrophe”.
Kuruneri was ”given back his money in another form” four months later and deposited it in an Absa account in South Africa, the court heard. He used it to finance a R5-million house in Cape Town .
Kuruneri’s defence advocate, Jonathan Samkange, upped the stakes last week when he applied to the court for CBZ to produce foreign currency suspense accounts, individual inward foreign currency accounts, outward foreign currency ledger books and foreign currency account ledger books for individuals.
”If the CBZ had produced the documents,” an M&G source said, ”it would have exposed how CBZ partici-pated on the illegal parallel market.”
”Gono would have had to explain deposits and several prominent individuals would have been implicated.”
Officials from the President’s Office, Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority and the National Oil Company of Zimbabwe would have been called to explain ”questionable foreign currency transactions”, the source said.
But hours after Samkange lodged the application last week, Kuruneri was taken from the Harare Central Prison to a meeting at an undisclosed venue. A senior intelligence official, the M&G is reliably informed, told Vice-President Joyce Mujuru of the developments and she personally ”advised Kuruneri of the repercussions of having the documents his lawyer had applied for released”.
That same evening Samkange was summonsed to court where, in the company of three prison officials and three intelligence officials, he was instructed by Kuruneri to drop the application. Samkange duly complied.
The M&G has learnt that Gono was also under investigation but had ”explained himself to the president”. On June 3 he told the court ”extraordinary circumstances sometimes demand extraordinary dealings.”