Offshore shell companies are often used to hide these fishy deals No doubt the ZANU-PF government will always deny such knowledge of shady dealings. It is Sergei Sheiman and Alexander Zingman who are the beneficial owners of the 70% stake in Zim Goldfields so it was never a government to government deal – always a gold mining venture set up to benefit these two private individuals. However, Midlands Goldfields Ltd (MGL) is owned 100% by Midlands Goldfields Foundation (MGF) which was the secret company registered in the Seychelles revealed by the Pandora Papers that is owned by Sergei Sheiman, Victor Sheiman’s son and a powerful Belarusian businessman Alexander Zingman who served as Zimbabwe’s honorary consul in Belarus since early 2019. Midlands Goldfields Ltd, the UK company has a proxy director, named Robert Michael Friedberg. The mining deal was in fact a private deal in which the Belarus government had no stakeĪ local Zimbabwean company, Zim Goldfields was formed, with Zimbabwe’s state-owned mining company, the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation (ZMDC) owning 30% and the remaining majority of 70% owned by a UK shell company called Midlands Goldfields Limited (MGL) The OCCRP articles reveal that the inter-government deal mysteriously changed into private gold-mining deals between Sergei Sheiman and other Belarusians through alleged offshore accounts in which the Belarus government had no stake and the Zimbabwe government had only a 30% minority stake through ZMDC. They talked about the supply of Belarusian equipment to Zimbabwe, the development of mineral deposits there, as well as about cooperation between the two countries in the field of defence. “ Nobody is going to cooperate for free. If they have no money, they are ready to pay with minerals. It suits us ” Victor Sheiman said. In 2019 to reach $500 million in trade between Zimbabwe-Belarus and by 2020 - $1 billion. Reports that were issued later stated a mining deal had been agreed as a collaboration between Belarus and Zimbabwe and Sheiman said it was intended to make “profit for Belarus.” The Zimbabwean newspaper reported that Sheiman and Winston Chitando, Minister of Mines and Mining Development, agreed to establish a joint mining company called Zim Goldfields. Since then, Sheiman has flown to Harare at least twice, and Zimbabwe's President Emerson Mnangagwa visited Minsk, where he met with Lukashenko. At the time he was head of the Presidential Property Management Department for Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Viktor Sheiman, Lukashenko’s right-hand man was sent to Zimbabwe in March 2018 to begin the deal between the Zimbabwe and Belarus governments. The information came from the leaked documents in the Pandora papers. An independent journalism organization, Journalism Development Network Inc trading as the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has revealed in articles – on which this article is based - that the son of Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko’s right-hand man and his son are involved in some suspicious gold mining deals in Zimbabwe.
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