WeeklySA_AdminESWATINI’S WEAK MONEY-LAUNDERING CONTROLS
Over 890 000 leaked documents from the EFIU were obtained by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a non-profit organisation devoted to publishing and archiving leaks, and shared with the ICIJ and its partners as part of the Swazi Secrets investigation.
The documents show that in less than one month, from late November 2018 to mid-December 2018, 10 transactions worth about $4.7 million at the time (R67 million at the time) were made from a murky South African “cash-in-transit” company to Schofield, who then sent about the same amount to Mint of eSwatini in the SEZ, from where the money went on to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. eSwatini’s authorities deemed the transactions suspicious.
The EFIU’s analysis led it to suspect an illicit operation to launder money and smuggle gold through the kingdom — connecting eSwatini to a much larger operation involving gold smuggling and money laundering across southern Africa and stretching to the gold markets of Dubai. This operation was exposed by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, a partner in Swazi Secrets, in its 2023 Gold Mafia investigation. Al Jazeera’s exposé showed how rival gangs controlled Zimbabwe’s gold trade, smuggling the precious metal across borders and helping Zimbabwe’s regime evade sanctions. These gangs, linked to heads of state and their inner circles, help criminals launder illicit money through international gold transactions.
Money movers
While the SEZ garnered little interest among international investors, Keenin Schofield and Alistair Mathias smelled opportunity.
Schofield, a jeweller who grew up in Swaziland and South Africa and is now in his mid-30s, sells high-end watches and custom-made jewellery to global elites and wealthy celebrities. (He was also once arrested for smuggling: In 2009, when he was 20, he was convicted by a Zimbabwean court of illegal possession of diamonds and fined $400.
Schofield’s links to the Swazi royal family are less visible. There is little public information on his marriage to Princess Temtsimba, one of the king’s daughters, but he confirmed the marriage to ICIJ and said he and the princess have two children.
Mathias (40) told Al Jazeera he operates out of Dubai but works in Switzerland and several countries in Africa, where he claims to be close to political elites. He said to Al Jazeera’s undercover reporters that he has pumped money into electoral politics in Africa, including in Ghana.
In the documents, the EFIU notes Mathias’ involvement in a legal matter in which he “was accused by his business partner of defrauding him in a gold business.” A UAE court exonerated Mathias.
Al Jazeera in 2023 implicated Mathias alongside his business partner, convicted Zimbabwean gold smuggler and former international rugby player Ewan Macmillan, nicknamed “Mr Gold.”
In its investigation, Al Jazeera uncovered rival gold smuggling and money laundering syndicates made up of many characters (“from new-age pastors to old-school smugglers, and from diplomats to the Zimbabwean president’s niece,” as one story notes) moving billions of dollars in illicit gold and laundered cash. Al Jazeera described Mathias as the “brains” behind one such operation — an “architect” of elaborate schemes to launder money “for people all over the world,” allegedly including African politicians.
Mathias told Al Jazeera’s undercover reporters that he “moves” gold worth between $70 million and $80 million each month through Ghana and southern Africa. Mathias, who travels frequently to eSwatini, also boasted on camera about being a friend of Mswati III. Schofield told ICIJ that a friend of his introduced him to Mathias in mid-2018. Soon after that, the two were in a business relationship.
The SEZ launched in the first half of 2018, offering favourable incentives: exemptions from corporate tax and foreign exchange controls, and the “unrestricted repatriation of profits.” By June, Mint of eSwatini was registered in the SEZ, with its two directors, Schofield and Mathias, each owning 50% of the shares.
In an interview, Schofield said he had wanted to establish a refinery before he met Mathias: “I had met all the relevant stakeholders in eSwatini to get the licensing done … but I just wasn’t able to get it over the line in terms of raising enough capital,” Schofield told ICIJ.
Schofield says that’s where Mathias came in: he would put up the money and was “leading” the project. Schofield, meanwhile, would act as the local partner, he says, by building relationships in Eswatini and introducing Mathias to “relevant people.” His own company, Schofield & Co., would be one of the “agents” that would buy finished gold products like gold coins from Mint of eSwatini and sell them on.
A royal mint
AMFS was little known at the time but soon began to attract notoriety for its involvement in alleged money laundering. Around the time AMFS began to funnel money to Schofield & Co., South African media revealed its alleged role in the looting of a small Namibian bank, Small and Medium Enterprises Bank Ltd., or SME Bank.
Liquidators for SME Bank, which collapsed amid massive fraud, alleged that a portion of the millions of dollars stolen from the bank was laundered through AMFS. The liquidators labelled AMFS a “money laundering machine” and successfully froze the company’s accounts.
From August 2018 to June 2022, a South African government commission investigated state capture alleged that AMFS laundered money from a corrupt airline deal. When the Central Bank of eSwatini and EFIU began probing the businessmen behind the money, they noted Schofield’s run-in with the authorities in Zimbabwe 10 years earlier but not his royal connection.
This time, Mathias turned to another major South African commercial bank, Nedbank, which eSwatini’s Central Bank described in the report attached to its 2019 letter as having “weak anti-money laundering and counter financing of terrorism controls and is under close monitoring.”
His relationship with Mathias turned sour, he says, when Mathias cut him out of business meetings. “From that moment I started pulling back,” says Schofield. In January 2019 the two parted ways, according to Schofield, and the Mint of eSwatini refinery was never built.
That month, Mathias set up his RME Bullion company in the SEZ. According to its website, RME (short for Royal Mint of eSwatini) was “endorsed by His Majesty King Mswati III” and “aims to strengthen eSwatini’s economic and commercial ties with other global commodity and financial centres by becoming the go-to partner for entities engaged in the precious metal business.”
Nedbank did not answer questions about its involvement with RME, saying that it “is bound by client confidentiality and therefore does not disclose client matters.” The bank added: “Nedbank eSwatini is governed by strict and robust internal policies as well as statutory/regulatory guidelines.”
Alarm at the central bank
The central bank highlighted the risk the SEZ posed as a potential gaping hole in the country’s economy, through which millions in illicit funds might flow, and which could make the country a haven for “criminals that will abuse the financial system.”
The central bank officials’ fears about the SEZ were confirmed when Mathias claimed to the bank that the SEZ essentially operated “as a country on its own and therefore, laws applicable to local companies do not apply to the operations at SEZ.”
‘I can’t sit here and deny things’
· The Central Bank of eSwatini and EFIU did not respond to ICIJ’s specific questions. Instead, they said in a joint statement emailed to ICIJ that “we cannot respond to questions on any information relating to confidential communications.”
· Schofield acknowledged that the convoluted transactions could have been an illegal scheme, but he blamed Mathias, claiming Mathias was essentially paying himself via a complicated detour through eSwatini.
· Mathias did not respond to ICIJ’s questions for this article. However, in response to Al Jazeera’s investigation, Mathias “denied that he designed mechanisms to launder money and said that he never laundered money or gold or traded illegal gold or offered to do such things.”
In the view of the central bank, the SEZ had the potential to be an open wound through which eSwatini’s fragile economy risked haemorrhaging millions of dollars.
For Musa Motsa, the lofty promises of development are jarring. Looking out over the land that he was kicked off more than a decade ago — where he grew up and eventually built four small houses that he rented out — Motsa wonders what it was all for.
“I am 51 years old, and I don’t have my home,” he says. “… and the sad part is there is nothing here.”
* ICIJ is a network of international 290 of the best investigative reporters from 105 countries and territories. Warren Thompson is a reporter with Finance Uncovered.
