Is Rautenbach Mnangagwa’s man?

The book says although Rautenbach has a short fuse he knows how to read people and can deal with a border guard or a president. As he had no expertise in mining, the book says, Rautenbach soon fell out with Kabila when the money ran out and he was fired.

“That might have been the end for Billy Rautenbach. Might have been, had he not understood that dirty money’s true value is not measured in numbers. It is measured in names – knowing the names of those it has corrupted,” the book says.

“To the Congolese, he let it be known that he had documentary proof of how much he had paid Kabila personally for his mining concession. To the Crocodile and the others he had enriched in Mugabe’s court, he made the same threat: as one minister put it, to ‘spill the beans on the lot of them’.”

After a lull from 2000, Rautenbach resurfaced in 2008, this time with his business partners in the Central African Mining and Exploration Company (CAMEC), Andrew Grove and Phil Edmonds.

Australian moneyman Vanja Baros had decided to move into Zimbabwe with his partner Michael Cohen of Och-Ziff by investing in CAMEC.

“In Zimbabwe, Baros met Andrew Groves, the son of a Rhodesian policeman who had knocked around the African mining scene for years, raising money from investors in London with his partner, a retired England cricketer called Phil Edmonds. Their most recent venture was called Central African Mining & Exploration, or Camec. They had a Zimbabwean shareholder, too, and Baros made his acquaintance as well – Billy Rautenbach. Rautenbach had taken a stake in Camec in exchange for some of his Congolese mining concessions. Cohen and Baros had already put some of the Och-Ziff hedge fund’s millions into Camec. After Baros’s Zimbabwe trip, they put in a few more, taking the total to $150 million. They might have been less enthusiastic had they established what that money would be used for,” the book says.

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