Posted on 08/18/2002 2:50:48 AM PDT by Clive
The notorious property magnate Nicholas van Hoogstraten, convicted of manslaughter last month, has been involved in secret negotiations to help the Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe buy Russian fighter jets.
Leaked documents reveal that in return for underwriting the £250m purchase of 14 MiG-29s, Hoogstraten would receive 1.2m acres (500,000 hectares) of prime ranching property, much of which would be taken from white-owned farms.
The Zimbabwean intelligence documents, obtained by The Sunday Times, disclose that Mugabe was told last month by the head of his air force that Hoogstraten was interested in underwriting the loan for the MiGs.
At the time Hoogstraten was on trial for killing a former business partner.
The document, dated July 5, states: "Mr van Hoogstraten is not unreceptive to the idea of underwriting the loan in exchange for an additional 500,000 hectares of land . . . his current circumstances though are creating difficulties in finalising the arrangements."
Mugabe, who is said to be worried by the superiority of the South African air force and the increased military power of Botswana, has been seeking to upgrade his air force for some years.
According to the leaked documents, a Zimbabwean delegation travelled to Russia earlier this year to prepare a technical evaluation of the MiG-29 multi-role combat aircraft.
The underwriting deal, outlined in an addendum to the technical evaluation, would make Hoogstraten the biggest landowner in Zimbabwe, where last week the government charged five white farmers and arrested more than 80 others for defying orders to vacate land.
Hoogstraten already has a huge landholding of more than 500,000 acres after taking over three estates formerly belonging to Lonrho, the conglomerate built by "Tiny" Rowland, in the 1990s.
This weekend Hoogstraten's lawyer Giovanni di Stefano, who has also represented the assassinated Serbian warlord Arkan, denied "any specific allegations" of arms-dealing However, he added: "His (Hoogstraten's) investments and sympathies with the Zimbabwe government are well known and while to date he has received no request for assistance, if any such request were received he would adjudicate each request on a purely business proposition."
Hoogstraten, 57, is in Belmarsh prison awaiting sentence for manslaughter after being found guilty of hiring two hitmen who shot and stabbed to death a former business partner, Mohammed Sabir Raja. The jury accepted that he had hired the men to harm Raja but not that he had specifically ordered his murder. The property baron's ruthless and violent reputation stretched to Zimbabwe where he routinely threatened his farm managers, whom he labelled "white trash". He is said to have fathered five children by three different women there.
Hoogstraten's backing for the Mugabe regime won him friends within the ruling Zanu PF party and his lands have been relatively unaffected by the past two years of lawlessness.
The two biggest landowners in Zimbabwe are Hoogsratten and the Oppenheimers.
Both are absentee landlords
Both have effectively been exempted from the land siezure insanity (apart from some token land transfers to which they had each agreed).
Just about all of the resident-owned commercial farmland in Zim has been siezed or is in the process of being siezed, without compensation, with the attendant dismantling of the agrarian economy, the destruction of the mixed economy, the internal displacement of white farmers and hundreds of thousands of farm workers and their families and the appearance, for the first time, of famine in what was once the breadbasket of southern Africa.
The Oppenheimer holdings are the size of Belgium.
"Money talks and ..."
But the names Hoogstratten and Oppenheimer, give the lie to the assertion by Zanu PF that this is an exercise in rectifying a colonial era induced imbalance in land ownership.
What a hoot!
People who have just begun to understand the operation and uses of the machette getting Russian fighter jets?
On second thought though, keeping the jets polished may help them not notice how hungry they are.
That could be one great air show.
"And now we demonstrate the nose dive! Whoops, there's the groun...."
Mugabe is insane, this is Alice in Wonderland redux.
Here's a man who is ruthless and has no respect for the laws of his country.
He's rendered all checks and balances (parliament, the courts, and the press) impotent and siezed absolute control of his country.
He guarantees his popularity by playing on his peoples' hatred of a tiny minority. Sound familiar?
Trouble is, he's quickly running out of internal enemies to demonize. Now, he wants warplanes? This tells me his attentions are turning outward toward neighboring nations.
It's 1938 all over again...
Victor Bout, Ari Ben-Menashe, Arkadi Gaydamak, Leonid Minin, Pierre Falcone, Yair Klein and Semyon Yukovich Mogilevich never had problems finding pilots.
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