Kamushinda came to Namibia to steal, and he succeeded: Heathcote

By Allexer Namundjembo

It has been seven years now after the SME Bank was looted, and yet the main culprit, Enock Kamushinda, has not been brought to book. The Bank of Namibia licensed the SME Bank in  November 2012 and approved a 30% shareholding for Kamushinda’s bank Metbank and 5% for his company, World Eagle Investments.

The Namibian government held the other 65% through the Namibia Financing Trust. Kamushinda was the SME Bank deputy board chairperson when the Bank of Namibia shut down the bank in 2017. At the time, the SME Bank had been looted of N$257 million, which belonged to depositors.

The depositors were small businesses, informal traders, big companies, and state-owned enterprises like the Social Security Commission. By the time the Bank of Namibia moved in to contain the situation, Kamushinda had skipped the country and Kamushinda and other executives from Zimbabwe.

Efforts to sniff out Kamushinda or recover the millions stolen have not brought joy to Namibians whose hard-earned money was lost. The depositors will now get 15 cents for a dollar deposited with the SME Bank. This week, the liquidators said about 23,000 depositors would have to share N$30 million, a far cry from the N$247 million looted from the bank.

The liquidators, David Bruni and Ian McLaren, traced the money to South Africa through cash-in-transit companies. From there, the money went to two companies in Zimbabwe. The Supreme Court stated in March 2024 that the liquidators had provided evidence that some of the stolen money was transferred to Kamushinda’s companies, Crown Finance Corporation and Heritage Investments.

McLaren told the media that the money was traced to precisely five or six recipients. They also found out that SME Bank had no assets. The Windhoek High Court delivered a judgement in October 2022, stating that Kamushinda had taken part in the looting of the bank.

Judge Collins Parker said Kamushinda not only knew the SME Bank was being defrauded while he was serving as one of the bank’s directors since its inception in March 2011 until the Bank of Namibia had the bank wound up in July 2017, but he and two of his companies also received money stolen from the bank. Parker declared Kamushinda, his company World Eagle Investments, and the Metropolitan Bank of Zimbabwe (Metbank) liable for the SME Bank debts. In addition, Parker also granted a judgment against Kamushinda, World Eagle Properties and Metbank for the payment of N$1,02 billion to the liquidators of the SME Bank.

He further granted a judgment against Metbank and World Eagle Properties for the payment of N$121 million and N$20 million to the SME Bank’s liquidators regarding the two shareholders’ outstanding payments for their shares in the SME Bank. Kamushinda, Metbank and World Eagle Investments in April 2019 filed an application in the High Court in which they asked the court to declare that the Bank of Namibia violated their constitutional rights by closing the SME Bank. In the counterapplication, McLaren and Bruni asked the court for the orders granted by Parker. The judge found that evidence placed before the court showed “Kamushinda has taken part, or concurred, in the carrying on of the business of the SME Bank recklessly or fraudulently.”

Parker said according to evidence that the liquidators provided to the court, they have found that more than N$247 million had been transferred from accounts of the SME Bank and stolen by Kamushinda through his companies Crown Finance and Heritage Investments.

He said the theft was orchestrated through the transfer of funds totalling some N$247,5 million to a South African entity, Asset Movement and Financial Services (AMFS), and that most of the stolen money had also been transferred back to Namibia and “directly into the fraudulent corporate entities of Mr Kamushinda”. Kamushinda agreed to pay back N$140 million of the N$247 million stolen from the bank. However, it was reported that he only paid back N$ 3 million. According to documents from the High Court of Zimbabwe, he questioned the validity of an N$140 million settlement agreement with the bank’s liquidators, claiming he had signed it because he feared going to jail.

The liquidators said they had stopped looking for Kamushinda but had yet to cancel. “The process has stopped, and we don’t know what we are going to recover there, because we understand he has relocated to Singapore”, the liquidators said. The liquidators also failed to attach any of Kamushinda’s assets in Zimbabwe, saying it could not be done quickly and easily. “We have attached N$50 million of MetBank’s money, which was previously known as Metropolitan Bank of Zimbabwe, who were shareholders in SME bank,” they said.

Prosecutor General Martha Imalwa said she was unaware if Kamushinda was found guilty and could not answer whether her office would pursue or try to hunt him. In March 2024, Supreme Court appeal Judge Dave Smuts ordered the registrar to share the liquidators’ documents in the SME Bank case filed in the High Court with the prosecutor general.

Smuts said while there was evidence that Kamushinda contravened the Companies Act and the Prevention of Organized Crime Act, Namibia did not issue a warrant of arrest. “Economic crime of this scale within the context of the Namibian economy justifies an appropriately serious response,” Judge Smuts said, adding that there was a prima facie criminal conduct on a rampant scale involving the theft of more than N$247 million from a registered bank to the detriment of its several deposit holders and creditors.

The Supreme Court said High Court orders against Kamushinda, Metbank and World Eagle Investments in a High Court judgement in October 2020 could be executed after his appeal filed against the High Court’s judgement lapsed.

 “The large-scale misappropriation of SME Bank funds was, according to the compelling evidence provided by the liquidators, perpetrated by Mr Kamushinda and identified individuals who were employed in the finance department of the SME Bank, all of whom were, like Mr Kamushinda, Zimbabwean nationals,” Smuts said.

According to the Supreme Court papers, the judges questioned how such systematic looting of a registered bank was able to proceed over such a sustained period, raises questions concerning the efficacy of the regulation and supervision of the SME Bank, primarily after external auditors had raised concerns about investments totalling N$196 million with a South African. Senior counsel Raymond Heathcote, who represented the liquidators, described Kamushinda as a fraudster and a thief. Heathcote said Kamushinda came to Namibia to steal a bank, and he was successful in that. “The SME Bank, we regret to say, was one big fraud. It had no other purpose – it was just to steal, it was just to defraud,” Heathcote said in the High Court in 2020.