Gold Mafia: Uebert Angel Says it Was All An Act, A Classified National Intelligence Operation
Self-proclaimed prophet Uebert Angel has denied allegations against him in the Al Jazeera Gold Mafia documentary.
Angel, who was appointed Ambassador at Large and Presidential Envoy to Europe and the Americas by President Emmerson Mnangagwa in 2021, said his words and actions filmed by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit (I-Unit), were staged and a classified national intelligence operation.
Addressing journalists in Harare on Friday soon after the final episode of the Gold Mafia documentary titled “Have The King With You”, Angel’s lawyer Lovemore Madhuku, said his client was working with national intelligence.
He said that after Angel was approached by the purported investors, he consulted the national intelligence to do security checks on them and was advised that something suspicious was going on. Madhuku was quoted by NewZimbabwe.com as saying:
This interaction led to what we are calling a classified national intelligence assignment which meant a decision was taken with intelligence authorities that he would play along and would not cancel his interactions with these persons, he would meet them as if he was going to make arrangements for them to meet the president and be able to do investments in Zimbabwe.
So it was in the context of a national intelligence operation, Zimbabwe wanted to gain intelligence out of it, and wanted to see how far its enemies could go and what the agendas were.
Ordinarily, these things are not told to the world but because of the intensity and implications of the documentary on the integrity of the operations of governmental systems in this country, my client felt obliged that he has a moral obligation to at least give an indication of what was going on.
Madhuku also claimed that the purported calls to First Lady Auxillia Mnangagwa and Zimbabwe Miners Federation president Henrietta Rushwaya as shown in the documentary were made to decoys. He said:
In that documentary, all the things that are said, no one was phoned, the first lady or Henrietta Rushwaya were decoys that were put in an intelligence operation. So even the statements that you hear are not real.
If you were to put it very boldly or mildly, they were acting along and it’s unfortunate that according to the version we are putting it is unfortunate that it is national security issues that are then played in public because of the agenda of these people which then forces issues that ordinarily would not be put on the table.
Last month Angel’s office, the Office of Presidential Envoy and Ambassador at Large (OPEAAL), responded to the Al Jazeera documentary and denied that he was involved in money laundering and gold smuggling.
In his press conference on Friday, Madhuku essentially repeated what the Chief Investment Officer at OPEAAL Sobona Mtisi said last month. Mtisi’s statement read in part:
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 the 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.
Angel’s assets were recently frozen by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe’s Financial Intelligence Unit.
Reports suggest Angel is likely to face money laundering charges and allegations of name-dropping.
More: Pindula News
