News Africa Extended

News Africa Extended

They fled nightmare in DRC only to find another in SA

Posted: 18 Aug 2016 10:40 PM PDT

James Biamungu and his family came to SA to seek the protection of the UNHCR but have been sleeping on a pavement for two years.

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Pretoria - There is no safe haven for James Biamungu*, his wife and their five children.

After a nightmarish 11 years of beatings, torture and death threats in three countries, Biamangu and his wife were arrested in Pretoria on Monday night - and now face being deported.

Biamungu and his wife, Tutsis from the DRC, had been sleeping on the pavement outside the UN building with other refugees before being taken to Pretoria Central Prison.

They have been separated from their children since June 3, when the entire family was first rounded up outside the UN building. The three older children were taken to Soshanguve and the two younger ones to Ga-Rankuwa by the Department of Social Development.

The parents have seen them once since being released. They went back to sleeping on the pavement until Monday’s re-arrest.

Biamungu fled to Zimbabwe in 2005 following brutal attacks by Congolese soldiers. The family was given refugee status and placed in a camp full of Hutus, who threatened their lives. They approached the UN High Commission for Refugees in Harare repeatedly for protection, only for Biamungu and his then pregnant wife to be brutally beaten in front of their three young children.

Biamungu was advised by Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights to flee to South Africa to seek the protection of the UNHCR regional office. Here, he and his family have slept on the pavement outside the UNHCR offices for much of the past two years, destitute, surviving on donations of food and blankets from local churches.

Their older children: ages 7, 9 and 11 have never spent a day in a school classroom.

Read more: Harrowing tale of family’s search for safety

“I had to help them as it seems to me that dogs are treated better in South Africa than these human beings, who are fellow Africans. Dogs have a right to food and shelter from the SPCA,” said Margaret Reiner, one of the retired church volunteers who has been providing Biamungu with food.

The Star approached the UNHCR for comment on the allegations, but the organisation does not comment on individual cases.

South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Fatima Chohan has become personally involved following The Star’s intervention, working to get the family reunited as soon as possible.

She said the UNHCR in Pretoria should have provided the family with adequate food and shelter while they were awaiting the outcome of their resettlement hearings and taken responsibility for the family from the moment they crossed the border at Musina in 2010 - and not pushed the problem on to the South African authorities.

“As they had been given refugee status in Zimbabwe, the family were the responsibility of the UNHCR, which was obligated to ensure their protection,” she said.

At the time of publication, the couple remained in detention. Biamungu is ill. He has received no attention. The churches have again been asked to assist.

*Not his real name

The Star

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Zim cops transferred from Beitbridge over graft claims

Posted: 18 Aug 2016 12:16 PM PDT

The Zimbabwe police headquarters has transferred all Beitbridge district cops over suspicions they were engaged in corrupt activities.

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Harare - The Zimbabwe police headquarters has transferred all Beitbridge district cops over suspicions they were engaged in corrupt activities.

In a shock move on Wednesday, police officers from the highest rank to the lowest were transferred from the border town to other parts of the country. The transfers were effected by police communique.

A police radio communique referenced JC345/16 released Tuesday, gleaned by African News Agency (ANA), showed that more than 750 police officers were transferred from Beitbridge to other areas, while a corresponding number replaced them.

“No one knew when the transfers would come. It came as a shock today (Wednesday). What triggered the transfers were the corruption allegations levelled against most of the Beitbridge District police officers,” a police source privy to goings-on told ANA.

“The transfers were done by the police human resources at the headquarters.

“The issue of police failing to act during the protests at the border town is secondary. Usually, the top guys are the ones who have to answer for that when such situations happen.”

The source said cross-border traders were circumventing legal channels and would bribe police officers at the border post to avoid declaring their imported goods.

However, national police spokesperson senior assistant commissioner Charity Charamba said the transfers were “not a new issue”.

“Use my response in The Herald and NewsDay,” she said in a text message.

In the two publications, she had said: “Ordinarily, police should be at a station for three years and not more. It’s common practice that they are transferred laterally. The government decided to transfer most civil servants at Beitbridge and police were the first to act”.

Beitbridge urban and rural had the biggest casualties, with 196 and 131 officers being transferred respectively, while the border post had 76 of them moved to new stations.

The border town police criminal investigation department saw all 66 officers being transferred, while the criminal intelligence unit had 27 of them being moved.

Four seniors and their 16 immediate subordinates were also not spared.

The move also saw the non-commissioned officers as well as chaplains being moved out of town. All the transferred cops are supposed to report at their new work stations by August 23.

ANA understands government will soon transfer all civil servants in the border town to other areas.

This is not the first time the police has transferred its officers.

Two years, all 33 officers at Avondale Police Station in the capital Harare had to be transferred after similar allegations were raised against them.

African News Agency

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It’s just not cricket

Posted: 18 Aug 2016 07:00 AM PDT

A tale of a cricket player who became a businessman, his Zimbabwean partner and some serious accusations.

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London - Cricket fans of a certain age will forever associate Phil Edmonds with those sun-dappled days in the Seventies and Eighties.

But as a star spin bowler, Edmonds was harbouring another obsession: becoming a business mogul.

In the middle of matches, he’d pore over a copy of the Financial Times and was overheard by playing colleagues negotiating deals on the payphone in the dressing room, as mobile phones had not yet been invented.

But his tangled business affairs in Africa are a long way from the gentility of Lord’s cricket ground.

He and his long-term business partner, Zimbabwean-born Andrew Groves, 48, have been accused by campaign group Global Witness of carving out an African business empire and leaving some investors out of pocket.

Edmonds was born in Lusaka, in what is now Zambia, in 1951 to a British businessman father and a Belgian mother. His real name, not much-used, is Philippe-Henri.

He moved to England in 1966 and attended fee-paying Cranbrook School in Kent, before studying land economy at Cambridge University.

There, he met his future wife Frances, who achieved fame in her own right as an author and broadcaster. For a time, they were the golden couple of the game, though their volatile partnership ended in 2007 after more than 30 years of marriage.

The gilded days of celebrity are long gone, but Edmonds’ business affairs are more than just fascinating footnote for cricket aficionados: the Global Witness report raises serious issues in the very heart of the Square Mile.

That’s because, although they operate thousands of miles away, Edmonds’ and Groves’ companies are listed in the city, on the London Stock Exchange’s lightly-regulated Alternative Investment Market.

Denial

The pair fiercely deny allegations of wrongdoing and say the claims against them come from former business associates who have an axe to grind.

But some are being taken seriously enough that the president of Liberia, Ellen Sirleaf, has ordered an investigation into accusations of bribery against one of their companies, Sable Mining.

It is said to have made corrupt payments to senior officials to win mining rights. Liberian officials deny pocketing any such payments.

Sable is a British Virgin Islands-registered firm, co-founded by Edmonds, that floated on the AIM market in 2008.

A grand jury in Liberia in June indicted Groves in connection with the alleged bribery scandal.

His lawyers have asked the court to dismiss the indictment, which his spokesman said was politically motivated.

Invoices seen by the Mail appear to show that the company was cultivating some well-placed friends.

Hunting trip

In 2011, Heine van Niekerk, a senior mining executive working for Sable, took Fombah Sirleaf, the stepson of the Liberian president and the country’s chief of intelligence, on a hunting trip to South Africa, all expenses paid.

Expenses documents show the company paid for Fombah Sirleaf’s gear and for stuffing the four animals they shot, which included a gnu. There is no suggestion Fombah Sirleaf provided the company any favours.

Jim Cochrane, the chairman of Sable, said any inappropriate actions by Sable in that country were carried out without the knowledge of the board.

He admitted there had been a lack of accounting controls – revealed by an audit in early 2011 – that had ‘exposed Sable to abuse by unreliable individuals’.

Ultimately, of course, company boards are responsible for making sure proper controls are in place and ensuring proper conduct by executives.

Global Witness also reports the testimony of a man said to be a former South African mercenary, who alleged he had been hired to ‘destroy’ van Niekerk.

Instead, the mercenary claims he switched sides and warned his target instead.

‘Groves told us that he wanted to destroy Heine van Niekerk, as he had destroyed others,’ he said in an affidavit.

It is a tangled tale in which it is hard to discern the truth – but one thing is certain.

Shares in Sable, which five years ago were trading at around 20p, are now worth just 0.22p, equivalent to a fall of 98pc.

Another failure

Another of Edmonds and Groves’ ill-fated ventures that appears in the Global Witness report is African Medical Investments (AMI).

The Isle of Man-registered business floated in the City in June 2008, raising £5.1m from investors. The plan was to set up a network of private health clinics aimed at Africa’s emerging middle class.

Three months after the London share listing, AMI bought a company called VIP Healthcare for £5m from a Zimbabwean medic called Dr Vivek Solanki, 53.

Dr Solanki told the Mail that he, along with Edmonds and Groves, was involved in an ‘inside job’ on a deal to buy a plot of land in mid-2009 in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique.

AMI bought the plot for $5.5m (£3.6m) to develop an exclusive clinic. But only a few months earlier the land had changed hands for just $2.2m (£1.4m). Whoever sold it, therefore, made a profit, at least on paper, of more than $3m (£2m).

The lucky seller turned out to be a company called EMP Services.

It was owned by a BVI-registered company, Penrith Management Trading that was linked to Dr Solanki and to trusts whose beneficiaries include relatives of Edmonds and Groves.

‘I put in $200 000 into the original deal to buy the land,’ Solanki told me. ‘It was an inside job, I admit it. I was duped into it. I am a doctor, not a financier, but I realise that is not an excuse.’

Edmonds and Groves said the trusts were for the benefit of family members that were not close-enough relatives that they needed to be declared under AIM rules, which only cover the children and spouses of directors.

They also said the family trusts made no profit on the deal, because they only received cash equal to the amount they spent buying the land.

The balance was paid in shares, on which they have not realised any gains.

Of course, if the hospital project had proceeded as hoped, the trusts might have profited handsomely from a rise in the share price.

Leaving

As it was, Dr Solanki left the company, having been suspended in July 2010 pending an investigation into alleged financial irregularities.

He says he quit the company after receiving a threatening phone call. ‘The person told me: ‘The last time this happened the guy ended up in a box in the Congo.’

He also says there were veiled threats his family could be ‘raped by Angolans’.

Shareholders back in the UK might well be frustrated and angry to hear these unedifying accusations flung around from all sides.

Wherever the truth lies, one hard fact is that African Medical Investments ran up multi- million-pound losses until, in February 2014, its listing on AIM was quietly cancelled.

Setting up businesses in Africa is risky and difficult. Nonetheless, Edmonds and Groves claim they can point to successes – such as CAMEC, founded in 2001 with £600 000 of capital.

It was sold to Kazakh mining group ENRC in 2009 for $1bn (currently around £670m). ENRC itself left the UK stock market in 2013 after an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office and a series of boardroom disputes.

Edmonds says he put £2.5m of his proceeds from CAMEC into his charitable trust, whose projects include funding a school in Zambia. The pair also cite as a success their platinum venture Afplats. It was listed on AIM in 2002 raising £525,000 and sold to Impala Platinum five years later for $580m.

The duo are, however, better remembered for White Nile, an oil exploration company floated in 2005, whose shares soared to 138p before crashing to just 3p.

In late 2008 White Nile switched from the oil business to agriculture and renamed itself Agriterra.

Shares in Agriterra have fallen from a high of 5.4p in 2012 to 0.23p. Edmonds, citing a health scare, stepped down as chairman of Sable in 2014 and gave up his role as chairman of Agriterra in April this year.

He and Groves correctly point out that building businesses in Africa is ‘only for the very brave’.

They have contended with factors such as the fall in the price of iron ore, the Ebola outbreak and political instability.

One question for British investors, however, is whether standards on the AIM market are rigorous enough for firms operating in distant parts of the world.

Global Witness says not: ‘It is run like an old boys’ club.’

The London Stock Exchange argues AIM is a highly successful growth market that has helped thousands of small and medium companies raise capital and create jobs. It says it has the power to investigate, sanction and suspend companies that break the rules.

Operating in Africa is a world away from the polished mahogany boardroom tables of the city: Mozambique and Maputo are not Mayfair.

Nevertheless, investors are entitled to expect the rules of the square mile, not the law of the jungle.

DAILY MAIL

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