Brit bank loaning money to Mugabe cronies for seized land

Sunday Scotsman:

BARCLAYS bank is helping to fund Robert Mugabe's regime by providing substantial loans to regime supporters given land seized from white farmers, it emerged last night.

The UK bank has lent £750m to the African country's new landowning elite in the first half of this year, mostly through a government-run scheme to boost farm productivity.

This weekend, the bank was under pressure to say whether it had loaned any money to five of Mugabe's most senior ministers, who are each named in EU sanctions against the regime.

It has been established that the five ministers have received cash for their farms under the scheme to which Barclays is reportedly one of the main contributors.

The top Mugabe henchmen include Didymus Mutasa, the national security minister, who helped draw up and implement the controversial land policy that left 4,000 white farmers without their livelihoods.

Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb last night pledged to ask Foreign Secretary David Miliband to investigate whether the loans from the bank, which has recently been opening new branches in the country, had breached EU sanctions.

Lamb said: "The loans sustain the regime and individuals within the regime and those who profited from the violent land-grab. It's morally questionable."

A spokeswoman for Barclays said that the bank had operated in Zimbabwe since 1912. She added: "We are committed to continuing to provide a service to those customers in what is clearly a difficult operating environment. We are also committed to the welfare of our employees."

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That is one of the strangest commitments I have ever heard. Mugabe has not only seized land on a racist policy but is also threatening to seize ownership of foreign business in Zimbabwe such as Barclays. How can they lend money in a country where the inflation rate is 8,000 percent? The bank needs to be investigated to see if its is in violation of sanction as well as sanity.

The Sunday Times has more on the questionable loans. It could be they were part of an extortion scheme as a price of doing business in the screwy country.