In a promotional video available on the Augur website, van Blerk says the land barter arrangement for the 20km road was worth $68 million. The highway, he says in the video, was to have seven bridges, one of which — a 450m stretch over the railway marshalling yard — was to cost $30 million.
Some 4,000ha of virgin land would be given to Augur, and this was to be used to create a satellite city to Harare, “our greatest and most exciting development project to date.”
According to van Blerk, an initial 400ha was given to Augur as initial payment. The company has used some of this land, in Borrowdale West, to build a mall, called the Mall of Zimbabwe, a 52,000 square metre development.
The Borrowdale mall project was launched by the then Acting President Joice Mujuru in October 2011, at an on-site event attended by several Cabinet ministers and high-ranking government and council officials.
However, councillors said the pieces of land that were given away as initial payment – amounting to some 93ha – were in fact transferred into the hands of a string of shelf companies, which had no evidence of legal links to Augur.
Papers filed in a 2014 lawsuit against Sharpe by some business partners does little to help peel away the mystery. According to the court papers, by 2012, Augur had been given land worth $15 million by city council. Separate pieces of land were handed to 11 nominee companies. The 11 companies are registered in the Seychelles and are all owned by Augur, the papers claim.
In March this year, according to separate court records, Augur was ordered to pay $4,8 million to T&C Construction, a subcontractor on the airport project. The company had not been paid for civil works for two years. The debt was paid in $3,3 million in cash and $1,5 million in land.
According to a 2010 report by the Auditor-General, the cost of building a road should not go over $500,000 per km. That would mean the 20km airport road would have cost $10 million. However, that figure may not have accounted for the quality of materials used, bridges and other costs.
By the time Augur’s role in the project ended, it claimed to have spent $20 million on it.
In 2014, after delays in completion of the road raised pressure on Augur, roads agency Zinara took over the project. However, that was only the start of a fresh controversy.
According to a report by the Auditor General, the taxpayer could have lost millions due to the use of old equipment and, yet again, a shady tender processes. The report says half of the $7 million project cost paid by Zinara and the Department of Roads had gone towards paying for the hiring of equipment.
“It was observed that 52 percent of the project amount was consumed with equipment hire, 36 percent by major road-related materials, 8 percent of the amount went to wages and lastly 4 percent was used on other accessories and safety materials,” the Auditor General’s report reads.
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