Denford Magora's Latest Zimbabwe News Blog

Mbada Mining, which I first exposed on this blog as a shadowy company operating as a front for the interests of powerful figures within the Zimbabwe ruling party, ZANU PF and Army Generals, was to hold a massive auction of more than 60kgs of processed diamonds at Harare International Airport today but there are indications that the auction was postponed to allow Kimberley Process people to come and observe it, since the diamonds from Chiadzwa have been banned from being traded. The announcement of the auction, however, was a ploy designed to achieve a specific end Harare, Zimbabwe, 07 January 2010 It was a breathtaking act of defiance and audacity. Mbada Mining, a shadowy company operating in the notorious Chiadzwa diamond Fields in Eastern Zimbabwe, had simply announced, out of the blue, that it would hold a Chiadzwa diamond auction at Harare International Airport, where 300 000 carats of diamonds would be sold to the highest bidders. Except, of course, they could not do that because ...

Robert Mugabe looks at a picture of himself taken by MDC-Tsvangirai Minister of Water Affairs, Sipepa Nkomo, who is part of his delegation in Copenhagen. This was yesterday, 16 December 2009. Meantime, back home, it is now clear just how much of a charade the whole mining thing at the Diamond Fields of Zimbabwe (the fourth largest in the world) is. Harare , Zimbabwe, 17 December 2009 Regular readers will, of course, remember me saying that of the two companies operating at the Chiadzwa Diamond Fields in Marange, Zimbabwe, Mbada was the secretive one, whose partners could not really be established and whose officials are reluctant to speak even to State media in Zimbabwe. Well,  the court case brought by Africa Consolidated Resources to have the two companies, Canadile and Mbada, evicted from the fields, has forced the Zimbabwe government to come clean. First, we were told that Mbada was a South African company that had partnered with the Zimbabwe Mining Development Company (ZMDC). That...

What investors? Mugabe arrives for Tendai Biti's Budget speech at parliament in Harare. The Zimbabwe government has installed two mining companies illegally at claims owned by someone else, despite their assurances to the contrary. Harare, Zimbabwe, 07 December 2009 It turns out the Inclusive Government of Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai lied through its teeth about the mining that is going on at Chiadzwa Diamond Fields. Only last month, they told us that the companies that have been given concessions to mine the area were "not mining the areas that are under dispute" - referring to the fight against Government by African Consolidated Resources, which is the original holder of the licence to the Marange claim. ACR had their licence withdrawn (probably because they are British) and had 129 400 carats of diamonds they had already mined seized, never to be seen again. But now it has been revealed that the two mining companies in partnership with Zimbabwe Government-owned...