admin
Yeukai Karengezeka
Court Correspondent
Harare regional magistrate Mr Stanford Mambanje is today expected to make a ruling on an application for bail by aspiring National Assembly member for Makoni West constituency Moses Ruwona and his accomplice Macmillan Chiweshe, who are allegedly involved in a US$500 000 fraud.
The pair spent the weekend behind bars when their bail ruling was postponed to today after Mr Mambanje said the State was only able to submit its written submissions late Friday afternoon.
The pair allegedly issued a fake receipts of payments to a major telecommunications firm and a financial services company, which was organising the payment for imports of fabric by a client.
They were arrested last week Thursday.
Waltrop (Pvt) Ltd specialising in commodity broking and represented by director Farai Chikuwa (43) was the first target of the alleged frauds.
Prosecuting, Mr Pardon Dziva said that in December last year, Waltrop was awarded a contract by Liquid Telecommunications Holdings of Zimbabwe to supply outdoor WiFi routers, importing these from Liquid Telecommunication Holdings of Mauritius.
On December 8, 2022 Waltrop wanted to pay Liquid of Mauritius for the purchase of the outdoor WiFi routers and Ms Chikuwa did so through her brother Aubrey Chademana who engaged Chiweshe who undertook to settle the Mauritius payment using his offshore foreign currency account. This was legal.
On the same day, Chiweshe received US$630 400 from Mr Chademana and forwarded it to Ruwona to settle the bill. Ruwona reportedly provided a fake proof of payment claiming to have transferred the money from his account in Zambia to the Standard Bank account of Liquid of Mauritius.
On January 20 and February 3 this year Ruwona and Chiweshe again sent Ms Chikuwa further fake proofs of payment.
On February 15, they sent a proof of payment of US$426 420 and on February 17, they sent a proof of payment of US$203 910. On March 7, they successfully transferred US$280 332 and US$132 151.24 to Liquid of Mauritius, but failed to account for the remaining US$218 249.
Using the same method, they allegedly defrauded Assess Finance of US$256 000 in a deal to import some fabric material.
The two companies reported the matter to the police leading to the arrest of the two on Thursday last week.
While Ruwona’s defence team has sought to characterise the ‘free fund’ arrangement between the complainants and his Tambwari Holdings outfits as money laundering, these transactions are allowed under Statutory Instruments 85 of 2020 and 109 of 1996 which permit individuals and companies to settle obligations using free funds.
In this case, Ruwona was entrusted by Liquid Telecom and the others on the basis of his purported access to such cash earned from his tourism management operations in Victoria Falls and Livingstone, Zambia.
According to the Statutory Instruments, the fundamental features of ‘free funds’ include the fact that they are lawfully held by a Zimbabwean, earned in foreign currency, and are not subject to limits and authorisation by exchange control authorities.
Online Reporter