Ewan Macmillan, (aka Mr. Gold) a Zimbabwean gold dealer, businessman, and suspected gold smuggler, claims he has President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s ear and does whatever he tells him to do.
In the fourth and final episode of the “Gold Mafia” documentary titled “Have The King With You,” Macmillan spoke to undercover Al Jazeera journalists who posed as gangsters who wanted to clean US$1OO million dirty cash through gold smuggling.
Speaking to the reporters, Macmillan boasted that when he was in trouble, Mnangagwa intervened on his behalf. He said:
I sat with him three months ago. Sitting with him, chatting to him… The good news is whatever I told him, he did.
Do you know that? When I was getting hurt, I said “You’ve got to stop it here, here, here, here”. And he did it, he did it. Within two weeks, he fixed everything.
He also claimed Mnangagwa came to his aid when he had a dispute with Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) Governor John Mangudya. It is not clear what the dispute was all about. He said:
You know Mangudya’s problem. I said to him [E.D.], “Mangudya, I think he’s dirty. You need to find him out”. E.D. went and fixed him.
Macmillan however, admitted that maintaining relationships with high-profile people comes at a high price. He said:
You pay a guy money every month. You just get a partner and pay so much money a month and he just sits back. He’s happy and doesn’t care. That’s what happens.
According to Al Jazeera, Macmillan was first jailed for gold smuggling in the early 1990s, when he was just 21 years old.
He is allegedly among a set of smugglers who work with Zimbabwe’s state-run refinery, Fidelity Printers and Refineries. He was quoted as saying:
There is an opportunity, a hell of a big opportunity to wash money here. I can give my partner gold in Dubai and he can just pay you anywhere in the world.
Macmillan did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for a formal comment about the investigation.
A 2020 report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) said gold worth US$1.5 billion was smuggled out of Zimbabwe every year by syndicates linked to political elites.
Source: Pindula News
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