First Lady Auxillia Mnangagwa and her son Emmerson Junior will most likely feature in Al Jazeera’s “Gold Mafia” documentary, with three out of four episodes yet to be premiered, it has emerged.
This was revealed by President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s Ambassador At Large Uebert Angel in a statement released on Saturday as his office tried to clear his name after undercover Al Jazeera journalists showed him offering to launder US$1.2 billion boasting that he was the second-most-powerful person in Zimbabwe.
In the first episode of the documentary, titled “The Laundry Service”, Angel is seen calling Zimbabwe Miners Federation (ZMF) president Henrietta Rushwaya in the presence of the undercover reporters.
Angel made the calls in an attempt to convince the “investors” that he was able to facilitate the laundering of more than a billion US dollars in cash.
However, in a statement on Saturday, Angel’s office said during his interactions with the Al Jazeera crew, he suspected that they were not genuine and decided to use “decoys”.
Angel inadvertently revealed that the President’s wife and son will feature in the documentary when he said “these decoys… posed as Henrietta Rushwaya, the First Lady and the First Son”.
A statement released on his behalf by the Chief Investment Officer in the Office of Presidential Envoy and Ambassador at Large (OPEAAL), Sobona Mtisi, read in part:
After these suspicions, the team switched to ‘red’ protocol, with the decision to proceed with extreme caution, be in the middle, and play along, and never to facilitate a meeting between the “investors” and the His Excellency, the President.
With this knowledge, and at the insistence of the “investors” Ambassador Angel made several calls to decoys working with our office.
It is these decoys who posed as Henrietta Rushwaya, the First Lady, and the First Son.
The calls to the decoys were made in light of the leading questions asked by the “investors”.
They kept pushing to have the First Family in the discussion, especially the First Lady and the President.
They even threw in figures to help in the charity organisation which Ambassador Angel refused and even told them he had his own money; this part was omitted from the documentary.
It’s just amazing how people are made to believe what has been propagated as gospel.
The best these people got are the audios from the decoys, they never got the chance to film the President or the First Lady because the Ambassador was already informed by the security agents prior to getting in the meeting that they didn’t have the money they claimed to have.
However, as aforementioned, we battled with what if the intelligence is wrong and the country loses the much-needed investment.
The decoys helped in asserting that if they were real investors, we would be able to get it from their reactions after the call.
There is no way Ambassador Angel could get hold of the First Lady and First Son without pre-arrangements and standard security clearance procedures in place in meeting with the First Family.
Moreover, the Ambassador has never met the First Lady. They never met and never had any direct dealings.
It would have been prudent for these “investors” to verify if the calls were indeed made to the people that Ambassador claimed to be calling.
