First, he promised an independent board to oversee issuance of the bond notes, which never happened.
Secondly, he refused to disclose the term sheet for the so-called Afreximbank loan.
Zimbabweans will recall that real faces behind the bond notes were exposed when citizens started challenging the legality of bond notes, at which point Mugabe used the Presidential Powers law to get the bond notes into the market against the wishes of the people.
Further legislation was issued to peg the bond notes to the US dollar. This move completed the illegitimate massive transfer of wealth from the people.
My questions to Afreximbank were simple.
Does the loan backing bond notes exist?
If it does, is there are term sheet and what are the terms?
To be clear, I was asking about the $200 million Stabilisation and Incentive Support Facility which Mangudya claimed the bond notes were based on.
“My brother, do not believe that guy,” my Afreximbank contact said.
“Such a loan does not exist. Because the loan doesn’t exist, it follows that a term sheet doesn’t exist,” he explained.
He went further to explain that Mangudya’s announcement that bond notes would be backed by an Afreximbank loan had created a reputational crisis for the multi-lateral lender.
“Our Zimbabwean office had to have a crisis meeting to decide whether to repudiate Mangudya’s claims or not,” he told me.
He further said that in the end, they had to remain quiet as any denial of the loan would have caused another confidence crisis since Zimbabwe is a member state of the bank, and that Mangudya himself is a ‘Class B’ member of the Afreximbank Board of directors.
He referenced the current IMF problem in Mozambique where the country did not disclose secret loans it had taken prior to IMF funding.
He further told me that Mangudya’s falsehoods had created problems for Afreximbank because some Zimbabwean lawyers tried to subpoena documents related to the non-existent loan from the Afreximbank offices in Zimbabwe at Eastgate Building.
What saved them, he said, was that there is embassy-level security at their offices, so they just never opened the doors to the lawyers.
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