A VISIT by Belarus’s army general Viktor Sheiman has raised eyebrows.
Sheiman, who is under European Union and United States sanctions over human rights abuses and shady business deals, previously visited the country to negotiate personal deals.
Sheiman is leading yet another Belarusian delegation which paid a courtesy call on President Emmerson Mnangagwa on Wednesday.
Speaking after the meeting, Foreign Affairs minister Fredrick Shava said the envoy was in the country to strengthen bilateral relations especially in agriculture.
“We have embassies in each other's countries. They are here to follow up on the deals signed by the heads of State (Mnangagwa and Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko) in January especially in agriculture. They have good dairy technologies and our dairy farms can benefit from them,” he said.
In March 2018, Lukashenko dispatched Sheiman to Zimbabwe to negotiate business deals on behalf of his government. Sheiman told Belarusian State television back then that the trip had produced deals to explore for minerals such as gold, platinum and rare earths through a joint mining venture.
The mining deal was presented as collaboration between the two countries, and Sheiman said it was intended to make “profit for Belarus.”
However, according to the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the new joint venture, Zim Goldfields, is secretly co-owned by Sheiman’s son, Sergei, with no stake for the Belarusian government.
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Sergei’s partner in the gold venture was named as influential Belarusian businessman Alexander Zingman, who has served as Zimbabwe’s honorary consul in Belarus since around early 2019.
The Pandora Papers leaks revealed that Sheiman and his family secretly owned an offshore company that was active in dealings with a Zimbabwean State-owned mining company.
Documents from the Pandora Papers — a massive leak to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists of nearly 12 million documents from 14 offshore corporate service providers, shared with media partners around the world — show how the two Belarusians used shell companies in the Seychelles and the UK to mask their involvement and the conflict of interest at the heart of the deal.
Sheiman has been one of Lukashenko’s closest allies since the 1994 electoral campaign that brought the strongman to power.
While serving as Belarus’ prosecutor-general in 2004, he was sanctioned by the EU over the disappearance of Lukashenko’ critics, and the US followed suit two years later.
