Zimbabwe’s Uebert Angel fired, faces arrest

One of Zimbabwe’s most influential diplomats, Uebert Angel, who was charged with a gold-smuggling scheme, has reportedly been stripped off his diplomatic status, foreign media reported.

Uebert Angel was appointed by President Mnangagwa to be Zimbabwe’s ambassador-at-large to Europe and the Americas.

In Sri Lanka, Angel maintained strong ties to self-proclaimed Prophet Jerome Fernando and visited the island in 2020 and 2022. 

Former Presidential advisor Eddie Cross told reporters last night that notorious gold smuggler Ewan Macmillan had fled Zimbabwe with his family. Mr Gold attracted a lot of attention after calling Vice President Chiwenga a dunderhead.

“The so called Pastor, the guy who claims to be a Christian pastor has been stripped off his diplomatic passport, in-fact he had his passport removed from him and the President has stripped him of all status, he might in-fact face jail traders,” Cross said.

The white gold trader has fled the country with his family.

Zimbabwe’s government is reportedly using smuggling gangs to sell gold worth hundreds of millions of dollars, skirting some of the consequences of tough Western sanctions imposed on the country over human rights abuses, Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit (I-Unit) reports.

According to the report the smuggling feeds into an enormous money-laundering operation, all facilitated by Fidelity Gold Refinery, a subsidiary of Zimbabwe’s central bank, and enabled, in some cases, directly by senior government officials and relatives of the country’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa.