On 9th December, the UK put three new individuals on the UK’s Anti-Corruption Sanctions list.
Kamlesh Pattni, his wife Minal Damji and brother in law Mukesh Vaya were all sanctioned for their roles in recent alleged bribery and money laundering in relation to gold exports from Southern Africa. Kamlesh Pattni and his wife are dual Kenyan and British citizens.
Two further individuals, Alain Goetz, a Belgian gold trader, and Anto Joseph, CEO of several gold trading companies – one of which had bought Russian gold, were sanctioned respectively under the Democratic Republic of the Congo sanctions regime and the Russia sanctions regime.
The sanctions action was taken in coordination with the US authorities who on the same day designated 28 individuals and companies associated with Pattni – including one of his UK companies, a company in the British Virgin Islands, companies in Singapore, Kenya and Zimbabwe, and multiple companies in Dubai and Kyrgyzstan. The US Treasury Department statement highlighted that Pattni’s “fraudulent [gold-smuggling] scheme has robbed Zimbabwe’s citizens of the benefit of those natural resources while enriching corrupt government officials and criminal actors.”
Pattni’s gold-smuggling network was first exposed by Al Jazeera’s Gold Mafia investigation in April 2023.
But Pattni has a long-history of alleged corruption. He was previously accused of being the architect behind the Goldenberg scam that saw between $600 and $1.5 billion siphoned out of Kenya in the form of government subsidies for fictitious exports in the early 1990s. Despite a judicial commission of inquiry and a 13-year court battle in Kenya he – along with implicated political elites in Kenya – escaped proper accountability for a scheme which wiped out roughly 10% of Kenya’s GDP.
According to the US Treasury statement, Pattni fled Kenya after this scandal and moved to Zimbabwe where he befriended then President Robert Mugabe and set up a similar scheme.
Pattni has used Dubai as a major financial centre for his smuggling, reportedly describing Dubai as “the centre for Africa,” because “You don’t need to have the paperwork too much, it’s much easier.”
Partners comments on the latest anti-corruption sanctions
Gladwell Otieno of the Africa Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG) said:
“We welcome the sanctioning of Kamlesh Pattni and his associates by the UK and US governments. Justice for the crimes committed under the rubric of the Goldenberg Scandal has been a long time coming and is yet to fully arrive. The scale and impact of the scandal are still not well understood. Goldenberg was not one, but a web of related high-level financial scandals that went beyond the payment of billions of dollars for phantom exports of gold and diamonds. It encompassed and undermined Kenya’s institutions including the Presidency, the Treasury, the Central Bank, the Office of the Attorney General, the Judiciary, Customs, Immigration etc. Public assessments of the losses it occasioned are probably underestimates given the limited terms of reference of official inquiries. More perniciously, Goldenberg became the prototype for what we now label as state capture; every major corruption scandal in Kenya since has borrowed some essential attributes of Goldenberg: compromising the legislature; pervasive executive impunity; high-level financial capture; capture and subversion of the electoral process; corrupting or demobilizing justice institutions and suppressing the judiciary.
Pattni’s sanctions-busting in Zimbabwe, just like the subversion of accountability conditionalities in Kenya decades earlier impoverished the citizens of both countries to enrich a corrupt elite. More must be done, especially on the role of prominent international financial centres outside Africa, that are being used to bleed its citizens dry and essentially enabling the operations of criminal networks such as this one.”
Lewis Kundai from the Civil Forum for Asset Recovery said:
“The sanctioning of Kamlesh Pattni and his associates represents a positive move in the fight against corruption and money laundering in the region. However, to achieve meaningful progress, this should be complemented by decisive law enforcement actions.”
Transparency International Zimbabwe said:
“More often than not, private sector players and professional enablers of illicit financial flows escape consequences for their involvement in criminal activities and for facilitating the flow of dirty money. In regimes where government officials are implicated, investigative journalists often face criticism, retaliation, and their reports are ignored. The recent move by the UK government is a significant step in supporting the vital work that journalists do in exposing criminal acts and ensuring that such allegations are addressed. We applaud the UK government for ensuring that the sanctions regime goes beyond corrupt government officials to hold all criminal networks and their enablers accountable for their actions. The UK’s sanctions will send a powerful message to corrupt private sector players, professional enablers, and other criminal networks involved in smuggling, money laundering, and transnational organized crime. We hope that all those implicated in the Gold Mafia documentary will be held accountable for their actions.”
Eva van der Merwe of the International Lawyers Project said:
“Congratulations to the UK Foreign Secretary for putting his anti-kleptocracy speeches into action. It’s excellent to see multilateral action. Coordinated sanctions are always more impactful in shutting kleptocrats out of global financial systems. It’s also great to see the UK starting to adopt a more intelligent approach that targets networks, their leadership and their allies. However, London remains a major hub for gold laundering. We encourage the UK Government to more ambitiously follow the USA’s whole-of-network approach. This will more effectively shut down networks that are stealing natural resources from citizens of the Global South, and will better protect their means of development.”
Anneke Van Woudenberg from UK corporate watchdog Rights and Accountability in Development said:
“We welcome the UK and US sanctions, and hope they are the beginning, not the end, of accountability. To truly tackle corruption, stolen assets need to be recovered and returned to the people who have been robbed of their resources. London’s role as the world’s largest gold market demands ongoing scrutiny to ensure it does not enable human rights abuses or illicit financial flows.”
Susan Hawley of Spotlight on Corruption said:
“These are very promising steps by a new government. We hope as the UK develops the anti-corruption sanctions regime, these kinds of actions will be taken more swiftly after allegations first emerge, and that it will expand the breadth of who it sanctions to include the full corporate network of those it targets. Both the UK and US should now be seeking to follow these designations with concerted steps to recover these laundered assets so they can be reinvested for the people of Zimbabwe.”
