A tale of two tyrants Sunday Times (UK) Date posted:Mon 19-Aug-2002 Date published:Sun 18-Aug-2002
Back to previous page		Nicholas van Hoogstraten, Britain’s most reviled landlord and a supporter of Robert Mugabe, has a vast property empire in Zimbabwe. Now secret papers link him to the dictator’s plans to buy warplanes Inside the residence of Robert Mugabe in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, life carries on smoothly despite the chaos in his country. The gardens of Zimbabwe House, a colonial Cape Dutch-style mansion, are immaculately manicured; teak furniture graces the rooms. Amid the finery last month, Mugabe gathered his military chiefs for a meeting that leaked documents describe as the “sixth defence and security brief”. As his people starved, the president and his “comrades” discussed the urgent need for a squadron of new MiG-29 fighter jets. It was an expensive deal, when all the backhanders were included, but the near-bankrupt country still has the odd few wealthy friends. The oddest is Nicholas van Hoogstraten, the most reviled landlord in Britain, who was recently convicted of manslaughter. He now faces a possible life sentence. That prospect, however, did not deter Mugabe and his cronies round the table. As they discussed the MiGs, Air Vice-Marshal R Mhlanga suggested that Hoogstraten might be just the man to underwrite the arms deal. In return Hoogstraten, already the owner of huge estates in Zimbabwe, would be granted another 500,000 hectares (1.2m acres). The suggestion was duly recorded in the minutes, obtained by The Sunday Times, which also noted that Hoogstraten’s “current circumstances are creating difficulties in finalising arrangements”. It’s not easy to conduct multi-million-pound international arms deals from inside Belmarsh prison in south London. Those who have met Hoogstraten, however, fear his influence still extends deep into the African bush. They say he has enough friends inside the fringes of Mugabe’s thuggish security underworld to maintain a reign of terror even while incarcerated. One estate manager, who, like many people who deal with Hoogstraten, prefers to remain anonymous for his own safety, remembered last week his first meeting with “Nick”. He had just shot an eland on a neighbouring farm and taken the carcass back to Hoogstraten’s main property, Central Estates, where he began processing the meat into biltong. He was suddenly summoned to see Hoogstraten in his office, where he found himself accused of illegally shooting cattle. “You’ll do what I tell you because I own you,” Hoogstraten told the manager, who replied that he had a permit to shoot the eland and had done nothing wrong, and had his constitutional rights. “You don’t have rights because I’m behind the constitutional amendments that will get rid of white trash like you,” retorted Hoogstraten. As the farm manager stood firm, Hoogstraten lost his temper. “People who don’t do what I tell them to have their legs broken,” he said. A suitable friend for Mugabe indeed. So how did two of the most unpleasant men in the world, one white, one black, one British, one Zimbabwean, come to be potential business partners? Zimbabwe has long been a land for intrepid entrepreneurs. Tiny Rowland, the tycoon who for years ran the trading company Lonrho, felt at home there, and Hoogstraten, say acquaintances, was an admirer of Rowland’s buccaneering style. In the mid-1980s Hoogstraten bought an 8% stake in Willoughby’s, an offshoot of the Lonrho empire that had mining and land interests in Zimbabwe. As Lonrho reorganised to distance itself from the apartheid regime in South Africa, Hoogstraten gradually increased his stake in Willoughby’s. By the mid-1990s he controlled about 23% - “enough to be difficult”, as one former Lonrho executive admitted. For years Hoogstraten cut a bizarre figure at the Willoughby’s annual meeting, where he “used to pitch up in a long black coat with fur-trimmed collar and cowboy boots. He flew into the room like Dracula, and he terrified the Lonrho directors”. Eventually he ended up controlling 70% of the company, which now owned three huge ranches in Zimbabwe - Central Estates and the nearby Eastdale and Essexdale estates. He began visiting the country roughly every six weeks, generally staying on Central Estates for two weeks at a time. According to Antony Browne, a former aide who worked for Hoogstraten in both Britain and Zimbabwe, the tycoon set up his own “private army”. It was called Savannah Security, which he jokingly referred to as the SS. It had 150 armed men who ran anti-poaching patrols. They are alleged to have killed 12 poachers - in self-defence - in three years. Hoogstraten soon made his mark in the community. He has had five children by three different black women from the Caribbean, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso. The children have been given grandiloquent names such as Seti, after an Egyptian pharaoh, Eugenie, after the French empress, and Louis, after the French emperor. Back in Harare, the Willoughby’s headquarters doubled up as another Hoogstraten residence, and became a transit point for an array of young African beauties he claimed he was sending off to his hotel group in the Caribbean for training. The few white estate managers he retained, meanwhile, were constantly reminded how Hoogstraten was above the law. “He even boasted to us that he had had people put down,” said a former employee. “I said, ‘Good heavens, Nick, you sound like you’re in the mafia.’ He’d just wink and grin: he liked that.” Nothing raised Hoogstraten’s temperature more than a resignation. “He went crazy,” said the manager. “He couldn’t bear the idea of anyone walking away from him. He immediately said, ‘Well in that case we’ll have to have your house razed to the ground’.” As he let the farming side of the estates fall into ruin, Hoogstraten spent lavishly, employing Browne, an English architect, to build an Italianate villa. He also built houses for dignitaries from Mugabe’s Zanu PF party and schools. Other former employees said he showed a genuine concern for his black workers. The houses now rear like fantastic follies from the bush - which without urgent maintenance may crumble fast, leaving edifices half-built, like Hoogstraten’s grandiose £30m country mansion in East Sussex. Apart from the estates, he also jointly acquired the old Lonrho building in Harare, which dates from 1910 and is one of the city’s most famous landmarks. From these bases he quickly made his political aspirations in the country apparent. “He told me that he was good mates with Comrade Mugabe, and that all the whites are racist,” said a former Lonrho executive. According to other sources, Hoogstraten had close relations with Shadreck Chipanga, a former head of the Zimbabwe Central Intelligence Organisation. He gave Chipanga’s wife a job and when Chipanga went into politics, Hoogstraten provided him with financial support. While Hoogstraten has held talks with some of the most influential members of Mugabe’s inner circle - such as Emerson Manangagwe, the parliamentary Speaker — his relationship with the president is more blurred. He travelled to the Zanu PF conference at Victoria Falls in December 2000, fully expecting to be feted as the great white friend of the president; yet he was left embarrassed when Mugabe ratcheted up his anti-white rhetoric. Weeks later, and much to his indignation, Hoogstraten found his own ranches invaded by war veterans; yet unlike some other white farmers, he escaped lightly. After talks with the local Zanu-PF elite - the governor of Midlands province, Cephus Msipa, refers chummily to Hoogstraten as “Nick” - the veterans have been kept under control. While Hoogstraten tried to cement these political ties, Zimbabwe became increasingly entangled in the complicated civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mugabe lent men and equipment to shore up the regime of Laurent Kabila, with help from Angola. Moven Mahachi, then defence minister of Zimbabwe, outlined an urgent need for new planes, which could no longer be supplied from traditional sources such as Britain because of sanctions. A company based in Maidenhead, Berkshire, offered to broker the supply of a dozen Russian Sukhoi-25s for $55m, but Mugabe feared the planes would be no match for the South African air force, or for that of neighbouring Botswana. Other documents obtained by The Sunday Times show that the air force was making its own assessment of the powerful MiG-29SE fighter, which officially cost £20m but can be heavily discounted by the Russian arms export company, Rosoboron. A Canadian company, Dickens and Madson, managed by a man called Ari Ben-Menashi, has advised the government on the potential purchase, although Menashi denies any involvement with arms trading. Insiders say the deal involving MiGs also gave better opportunities for kickbacks for senior members of Mugabe’s administration. But could Mugabe afford them? Or did he need or demand Hoogstraten’s help? Intelligence sources who examined the leaked documents last week believed they were authentic, though they could not definitively confirm them. Although Hoogstraten’s estates appear to be falling in value, diplomats said it was possible they had been identified as potential collateral in any deal with the Russians. “It’s not unusual for the military to keep pushing and Hoogstraten is an odd character,” said one western official in Harare. “It’s all odd, but Zimbabwe is a very odd place right now.” Hoogstraten’s latest lawyer is Giovanni di Stefano - whose other clients in recent years have ranged from the Serbian warlord Arkan to the timeshare fraudster John “Goldfinger” Palmer. Last week di Stefano said his client had “categorically denied any specific allegations” of being involved in buying MiGs for his friends in Zanu-PF. However, he added: “His investments and sympathies with the Zimbabwe government are well known and whilst to date he has received no request for assistance, if any such request were received, he would adjudicate each request on a purely business proposition.”