Mugabe Regime Bankrolled By British Companies: U.S Treasury Reveals 14 Mugabe 'Backers' are British-based

As the number of Zimbabwe’s cholera victims and its rate of inflation enter into a ghoulish race to see which can bring the country to its knees the fastest, the U.S Treasury department has acted to staunch the flow of cash that is keeping the country’s dotard president on his last legs. While the international community will no doubt welcome the news, it was received in Britain with mixed emotions when it was revealed that many of the businessmen blacklisted in the U.S are known to have ties to its former colonial ruler. Fourteen out of the twenty-one companies George Bush’s government embargoed have their headquarters in the U.K, who ran the country – then known as Rhodesia – until it claimed its independence in 1980.

Foreign Currency Keeps Mugabe in Business

Contrary to Gordon Brown’s assertion that ‘enough is enough’, the ex-colonial ruler – or at least its bank notes – is indirectly helping to keep the country’s maligned president in office. With the country’s inflation rate meaning that indigenous bank notes are massively devalued before they can be spent, leaders of Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party are trumping the country’s crumbling banking system by using foreign currency reserves brought into the country by owners of foreign-based businesses – not least the fourteen in Britain – to purchase currency not at the rate the hoi polloi are forced to struggle with, but at it’s official rate; a piece of financial legerdemain that allows the ruling Zanu-PF party to cling to power while maintaining Mugabe and his thuggish cadre in the lifestyle to which they have grown accustomed.

U.S Blacklists Four of Mugabe's Cronies

The U.S blacklist explicitly names four Mugabe cronies who are believed to be propping up the country’s leader. Chief among them is a Mr Bredenkamp, a white Rhodesian-born businessman with a British passport. The U.S Treasury asserted that Bredenkamp is a "Mugabe insider [who is] involved in various business activities, including tobacco trading, grey-market arms trading and trafficking, equity investments, oil distribution, tourism, sports management, and diamond extraction.”

Completing the quartet are a Thai businesswoman, Nalinee Taveesin, who is believed to have transacted a number of gem deals for the president’s wife, Grace Mugabe; Muller Conrad Rautenbach, a Zimbabwean businessman who advised the Mugabe regime on mining prospects during its intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and Mahmood Awang Kechik, a Malay jack-of-all trades who doubles as the president’s urologist and business advisor.

British Foreign Office Unsure of Status of Standard Charted Loans

With the prospect of Mr Bredenkamp now making the most of his British passport to enjoy an extended stay in the UK while his native country collapses further, the British government is faced with yet another potential embarrassment concerning its ex-colony. The foreign office has voiced its disquiet regarding the legality of loans made by the bank Standard Chartered Zimbabwe to the Mugabe regime. The bank is a foreign subsidiary of the London-based Standard Chartered. With the U.S taking such a forthright stance toward a nation whose exigencies are palpable, Britain risks appearing a moral laggard if it continues to countenance the moral ambiguities that have issued from its colonial past in the country.

HM Treasury Promises Action on Zimbabwe Impasse

The British government has attempted to temper criticism of its apparent inaction by asserting that it's deferal of further economic sanctions against the Mugabe regime is the result of its desire to act in concert with its partners in the European Union. A HM Treasury spokesman assured the British media that it was "considering a range of measures with EU partners in response to the continuing impasse in Zimbabwe." Britain's emphasis on the importance of elicting the support of its EU partners is no doubt due to the country's recognisance of the potential problems posed by its colonial past and the likelihood that any uniltaeral action would be met with Mugabe again crying foul. When asked at the African Union Summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt this year if he 'stole the elections', he dismissed the question and rolled out the riposte he knows makes Britons blanch most: "We are not a British colony!"

Dec 22, 2008 7:56 PM

Guest :

The unrelenting anti-Mugabe avalanche in the media is clearly an effort to conceal the West's complicity in Mugabe's murderous rule. Prominent individuals and institutions in the West once coddled the devil.

Following scattered incursions by apartheid South Africa-sponsored rebels in southern Zimbabwe in the early 1980s, Mugabe unleashed his ruthless, North Korea-trained 5th Brigade military unit. The unit exterminated 20,000 innocent villagers. Mass disappearances, beatings, gang rapes abound. Hundreds were burned alive. Some victims were forced to dig their own graves. Some were forced to sing songs praising Mugabe, before being executed.

The international community neither intervened nor chastised Mugabe. In 1984 Scotland's Edinburgh University awarded Mugabe an honorary doctorate of law degree. In 1986 the University of Massachusetts awarded Mugabe the same honorary degree. Michigan State University honored Mugabe in 1990. In 1994, the dictator became the Knight Commander of the Order of Bath, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

Zimbabwe's crimes grabbed global headlines only after the post-1999 killings, which claimed 300 lives from both MDC and Zanu PF. But now these killings included about a dozen white Zimbabweans. The dictator had also started repossessing white-owned farms to give to landless black peasants.

Africans generally deplore what is going on in Zimbabwe. However, students of African history are equally aware that the seed of the crisis in Zimbabwe was planted by the British. Just as they equally know that when it comes to African affairs, the EU, Britain and the US has no credibility. Their sordid record in Rwanda, Kenya, the Congo, Angola and Namibia completely disqualify them to lecture African leaders on what is good for them.