Laundered by Mugabe's thievocracy?

HARARE - Zimbabwe cannot account for more than 1.3 million carats of diamonds produced since 2003, according to a new report released last week, which raised suspicions that the precious mineral worth at least US$150 million may have been laundered by government and Zanu (PF) chefs into the international system.
The report said there was no clear statistical evidence to enable Kimberley Process investigators to prove that significant volumes of Zimbabwean diamonds had been laundered through the Kimberly system, Zimbabwe's own statistics showed a huge gap between what has been produced since 2003 and what has been officially exported.
The Kimberley Process was designed to halt the traffic in conflict diamonds which are directly linked to the fuelling of armed conflicts and activities of rebel movements.
The report, titled Zimbabwe, Diamonds and the Wrong Side of History and published by Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), said Zimbabwe was sitting on a stockpile of 1.33 million carats which have not been exported but are unaccounted for.
The number is higher if 2008 figures are factored in - more than 50 percent of the production between 2004 and 2008, said the report produced under PAC's Diamonds and Human Security Project.
Using the average value of diamonds exported over the past six year, the stockpiled diamonds would be valued at approximately US$150 million, according to PAC.
This is a great deal of collateral for a country as cash-strapped as Zimbabwe has been in recent years and the question arises: does this stockpile exists in Zimbabwe? asked the report authors who speculated that some of the diamonds may have been laundered into the international system in order to prop up a shaky and increasingly kleptocratic regime.
PAC also said there was evidence that Zimbabwe was being used as a conduit for smuggling blood diamonds from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
It observed that production figures provided by the Zimbabwe's Mineral Development Corporation to the Kimberley Process showed average per carat output to have exceeded US$110 between 2003 and 2007 yet some of the country's largest diamond producers clocked US$65 per carat averages.
The values suggest that these may not be Zimbabwean diamonds or that there is some other form of fraud taking place, the PAC report said.
It said some of the reported diamonds could be those looted by Zimbabwean soldiers and chefs from the DRC.