daniel chigunwe
Business Writer
Former Ministry of Mines and Mining Development Permanent Secretary, Francis Gudyanga, was on Friday slapped with a four-year jail term for corruptly claiming board sitting fees from the Minerals Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe (MMCZ) in 2013.
The board was dissolved at that time, but Gudyanga corruptly claimed the money in board and sitting allowances for three years.
Harare magistrate Barbra Chimbodza, however, reduced the sentence to two and half years on condition Gudyanga repays US$25 225 to the MMCZ by end of April.
According to the MMCZ Act, a board constitutes a minimum of six members and a maximum of 10, so no legal board was in existence.
He then corruptly claimed US$28 910 as board and sitting allowances, prejudicing MMCZ.
He claimed US$875 a month in board fees and US$460 for each of the 21 sittings of that non-existent board.
Besides this case, Gudyanga is also facing charges in a separate trial of defrauding the State of over US$1,6 million in deals with an Israeli company called Nikuv.
In that case, the State alleged that during the period extending from September 2014 to December 2015, Gudyanga, acting in his capacity as the Permanent Secretary for Mines and sometimes as the board chairperson of the MMCZ, misrepresented to MMCZ that the parastatal paid US$1 629 500 to Glammer (Pvt) Ltd, a foreign company through a local agricultural company, Pedstock.
Gudyanga allegedly further misrepresented that the money be accounted for as dividends due to the sole shareholder, the Government.
MMCZ, allegedly acting on Gudyanga’s misrepresentation, released the US$1 629 500 to Pedstock when in fact the money was not being paid to the Government as a dividend, but allegedly for a private arrangement which had nothing to do with the parastatal.
The dividends were supposed to be paid through the permanent secretary, the normal procedure for State-owned companies, for accounting by the Government and this allegedly was not the case in this particular transaction.
Bongani Ndlovu