THE Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board (TIMB) has instituted investigations into reports that acting chief executive officer Emmanuel Matsvaire allegedly violated the institution’s tender procedures.
Chairman Patrick Devenish has confirmed that the tobacco
industry regulator had received an anonymous report, which made claims related
to alleged corrupt conduct involving the acting CEO, with the board now
actively looking into the matter.
Mr Matsvaire, who was appointed acting chief executive
following the arrest of CEO Meanwell Gudu in September last year, is accused of
having violated tender procedures for personal gain, nepotism, abuse of farming
inputs distributed under TIMB’s tobacco credit inputs scheme (TICS), among
several other allegations.
Under the TICS scheme, the regulator disburses inputs to
merchants to support smallholder farmers who fail to access the inputs from
private commercial contractors.
In an interview with The Herald Finance & Business, Mr
Devenish said the board was alive to the allegations and was acting on them. “I
can confirm that we have received an anonymous report and the board is
following up on it,” said Mr Devenish.
He said given the report had come from an anonymous source,
the TIMB board would pursue all avenues to first ascertain the credibility of
the report before taking action.
This comes after Mr Gudu appeared in court in September
last year on allegations of abusing the tobacco inputs scheme, which was meant
to benefit small-scale farmers.
Mr Gugu appeared at the Harare Magistrates Court jointly
charged with former TIMB CEO Evaristo Matibiri and Stewart Shanyika, a former
head of special projects on criminal abuse of duty charges.
The inputs relate to a US$86,8 million facility funded by
the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, which was aimed at supporting small-scale tobacco
farmers with farming inputs and working capital in a bid to improve tobacco
productivity, ensure viable production of Flue Cured Virginia Tobacco of export
quality and to increase the size of national crop.
The trio was charged over alleged corrupt conduct in
handling the disbursement of inputs to four tobacco contractors namely Big Leaf
Tobacco, Central Leaf Tobacco, Bindura Tobacco and Ethical Leaf Tobacco.
To date, the contractors still owe TIMB about US$1,791
million from the 2020/2021 farming season.
Meanwhile, all is set for the 2023 marketing season
expected to open today, with the country anticipating to produce 230 million
kilogrammes from 212 million kg last year.
The auction floors will open today (Wednesday) while the
contract floors will open tomorrow.
The official opening will be held at Tobacco Sales Floor.
However, the bulk of the crop would be sold outside Harare
as many contract floors are now decentralized.
Also, with the bulk of tobacco now funded by contractors
(about 96 percent), a very small amount of the crop would be sold through the
auction system. This season, 85 percent of the proceeds will be paid in foreign
currency while the remainder will be liquidated at the official exchange rate.
Zimbabwe Farmers Union executive director Mr Paul Zakaria said the farmers were
hoping to get fair value for their crop.
“This year, we have got a very good crop. The rains were
good, even the dry land crop which is rain fed could be looking like the
irrigated crop because the rains were quite good.
“We are expecting a
very good quality crop. We are only concerned that the inputs were quite
expensive, so the prices we are going to fetch from the market should reflect
that,” he said. Herald
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