MINES minister Walter Chidhakwa has disclosed that teams of
auditors tasked to trace the whereabouts of government’s missing $15 billion
diamond proceeds are finding it difficult to get relevant information to
facilitate the investigations.
Chidakwa made the disclosure recently in Senate, while
responding to a question from Midlands Senator Lillian Timveous, who wanted to
know if the government had managed to account for the money, since President
Robert Mugabe went public over the issue.
“There have been three teams (of auditors) from three
companies that we appointed and, as a result, they have been working and the
last report that we got was that they were having difficulties with accessing
information,” he said.
“The contracted companies would not have unfettered access
to information that was required because the companies, which they wanted to do
forensic audits on were in fact before the courts,” he said.
Chidakwa said the government engaged private audit firms to
conduct the investigations after Auditor-General Mildred Chiri’s Office recused
itself, citing lack of resources.
“We restarted the activity for some of the companies once
the court cases had been decided upon and we realised that issues of information
still remained a problem. We have now opted for the use of technology to access
information and be able to establish exactly how much was moved from the
ground, and from there we will work out how many diamonds were lost in the
process,” he said.
Chidakwa said the Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company
(ZCDC) now needs to acquire new equipment to extract conglomerate diamonds,
since the alluvial ones are now finished.
“This House needs to know that there are not many alluvial
diamonds now in Marange, but there are many conglomerate diamonds. In
conglomerates, you need crushers. So, we had to re-engineer the entire
technology in Marange in order to suit the new type of mining and the new type
of ore that we were dealing with.”
The Mines minister said they now have close to 65% of all
the equipment required to mine conglomerates.
“We have accumulated 1,3 million carats over the last few
months. We are already higher than last year, when most of the court cases were
there. We just have not been selling. We have been mining and cleaning. The
reason we have not been selling is because our systems for evaluation had been
compromised. We have had to ask the Tswanas to come and they are coming in next
week to assist us with the valuation of those diamonds and after that, we will
now have a new system.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment