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About the Safari Papers The murky offshore world of lawyers and accountancy firms is finally being exposed as new revelations batter the once indestructible breakwaters that protect havens of tax avoidance and corruption. New waves of exposes are uncovering mass abuse of the international financial system for the benefit of the ultra-rich and over-privileged. Voices are increasingly raised in indignation at the unprecedented inequality sweeping the globe and are clamouring to change the international rules of financial behaviour. In the midst of this, it is vitally important that "onshore" criminal corruption is not overlooked – the endemic corruption of politicians, government-owned companies, banks, and publicly traded enterprises. We are lucky enough to be in contact with many ordinary people of conscience who realise the need to share factual information if we are going to stop the corrupt and powerful from misusing their privileges to grab ever more power and riches. For this reason, our sources have chosen to release to us a wealth of documents from within a number of African countries which starkly illustrate the gross corruption now prevailing across the continent. The results of this corruption are clear and visible. Political elites blatantly exploit the natural resources of their countries for their own greedy ends, leaving a majority of their citizens either struggling to survive or living in abject poverty. In the coming months, we will be uploading evidence to verify how squalidly African governments, firms, politicians, bankers and businessmen are behaving. While morally obliged to increase the prosperity and health of their peoples, they instead place themselves in strategic positions where they can benefit from corrupt practices and squander every opportunity to advance the welfare of their nations. Part 1: Zambia's Plague of Ineptitude Key sources have passed us information out of Zambia, providing us with a wealth of internal documents from ZCCM-IH – the majority government-owned, parastatal company, which owns shares in the country's mines. Zambia has the second largest copper reserves in Africa, second only to the DRC, yet it's recent inept, and potentially corrupt management, seems to be running the company into the ground. Zambia as a nation has escaped much criticism levelled at sub-Saharan Africa by the West in the past and has in fact been labelled as a bastion of democracy, a model to be followed by other impoverished post-colonial states. In recent months and years, however, Zambia has become more and more authoritarian, sliding away from its contemporary history of stability and progress. A state of emergency declared in summer 2017 allowed President Lungu to tighten his grip on power. The extended imprisonment of opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema effectively quelled the opposition, and the denial of a much-needed loan package of the IMF has pushed the country's finances to the brink of disaster. Our team of researchers and reporters have trawled through the financial reports, minutes of meetings and other internal documents, From this, a picture steadily emerges of a company which has recently seen a rapid decrease in fortunes, despite Zambia's wealth of natural resources. Before we explore specific instances of corruption and mismanagement in our future posts, here first is an overview of ZCCM-IH's recent demise. ZCCM-IH's financial situation was secure. In late 2014-2015 ZCCM was boasting of being the best-performing stock on the Lusaka Stock Exchange (appreciating 163.5 percent in 2014), having no debt, and valued at over $1 billion. In October 2014, ZCCM paid out a $40 million dividend to shareholders, one of the largest pay-outs ever by a listed company in Zambia. However, in the few years since, ZCCM-IH has been run into the ground by corruption and nepotism. The company's financial reports for 2016 noted a turnover of 199 million Kwacha and an operating loss of 846 million Kwacha – approximately US$84 million. More recent financial reports filed in June 2017 again show losses for ZCCM-IH -- The company recorded a loss after tax of K84.6 million for the quarter ended 30th June 2017 (March 2017: loss K164.6million) compared to a budgeted profit of K31.7 million. For example, Ndola Lime Company, a 100 percent subsidiary of the company, has gone from being very profitable and the main source of revenue for shareholder dividends to essentially wasting a US$100 million investment. This was meant to upgrade a plant which has not been completed, according to internal ZCCM-IH documents. There was a 46 percent decrease in the turnover of the Ndola Lime Company from ZMK 116.5 million in September 2015 to ZMK 62.5 million in September 2016. Another example is Investrust Bank, which was apparently bailed out as a favour to a former Minister of Finance and not because it was a sound investment for ZCCM-IH. ZCCM's share in the bank was increased from 10 percent to 48.6 percent in April 2016, despite the bank having serious management and fiscal issues. According to figures from October 2016, Investrust recorded a loss after tax of 10.75 ZMK (approximately US$2 million) in the first half of 2016. The purchase went through despite its being recognized as an unsound investment, according to internal ZCCM-IH documents. At a board meeting held on 26 May 2016, they reported that the purchase was one of the reasons for the company's poor economic performance in 2016. These briefly are just two examples of poor management and corruption at ZCCM-IH. As our perusal of the documents progresses we will share more in-depth analysis to highlight the ongoing plague of ineptitude gripping the African sub-continent. 
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ON Wednesday November 15, in the closing moments of the Dubai airshow, champagne corks began to fly faster than the fleet of 430 Airbus planes the company's ace sales shark had managed to steer past murky torrents of corruption scandals, to close the biggest deal in commercial aviation history. US investment firm Indigo Partners is buying the planes in a $49.5-billion contract brokered by Airbus' chief commercial officer, John Leahy.
As the camera's clicked away and Leahy touted this latest and greatest deal to the BBC as a personal triumph, the scores of other media reporting the bonanza also neatly sidestepped a looming elephant – how such a sales titan has managed to stay so clean amid the shady third-party intermediaries Airbus uses to close deals in nearly every corner of the globe. However, The New York Times noted that Indigo Partners, a US-based parent company of several low-cost carriers – including Hungary's Wizz Air, Frontier Airlines, Mexico's Volaris, and Chile's JetSmart – had received an undisclosed "fee" for every aircraft "sold" to each subsidiary airline. In this deal, 146 aircraft go to Wizz, 134 to Frontier, 80 to Volaris, and 70 to JetSmart, according to the website www.flightglobal.com. This new deal indeed crowns the career of Leahy, the Airbus sales titan who took the company's market share from 18 percent in 1993 to 57 percent a decade later. Over his 20-plus years at Airbus, Leahy closed deals on more than 15,000 jets worth an estimated $1.7 trillion. But his latest sales triumph is a reminder that kickback isn't called a kickback when it's structured openly into a sales contract between two Western firms. Airbus' use of third-party contractors to secure deals in corrupt and autocratic countries has in the past been dismissed as simply necessary for doing business in such areas. Today, however, this "normal" practice is being investigated in a few countries around the world, bringing some optimism to the global struggle against corruption. Leahy's name has been largely absent in media coverage of the several investigations, but this does not rule out the possibility of it arising later – after his retirement, perhaps – given the unfolding depth and scope of the corruption. Meanwhile, Airbus CEO Tom Enders has pointed a finger at the Paris sales office as the source of many of the illicit sales practices that have drawn the scrutiny of British, French, and Austrian investigators. For example, the Paris sales office approved a €700-million payment to a Turkish national for securing a $10-billion sale of 160 aircraft to China. There is also an investigation of several executives in the national airline SriLankan, over massive irregularities during the purchase of 10 Airbus planes in 2013. In Mauritius, the former head of government was bribed to buy six Airbus jets. The French PNF is investigating Kazakhstan's then-prime minister and current chief of intelligence, Karim Massimov, who received millions in kickbacks for signing a deal with Airbus/ EADS to buy 45 helicopters for the Kazakh government in 2009. In addition to the Kazakh case, the French are also investigating a €70-million payment Airbus made to the son-in-law of Tunisia's ousted president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, following the purchase of 16 aircraft. It's possible that Leahy, based at Airbus HQ in Toulouse, had no idea what was going on at the Paris office. Even in such a benefit-of-the-doubt scenario, Leahy, as head of sales and operations should be held responsible for such gross negligence. But we should also question why the media are now loudly applauding what is essentially the same behaviour in a slightly different context. |
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