Former commissioner’s Harare mansion purchased

Exiled former Zimbabwe Republic Police commissioner Augustine Chihuri's $7.1m mansion in Harare has been snapped up by Wicknell Chivayo, a convicted criminal with access to President Emmerson Mnangagwa. News24 reports that Chihuri was the only security chief aligned to Robert Mugabe wen tanks rolled into Harare in November 2017 and he was removed from power. In 2020, Chihuri’s mansion was attached by Zimbabwe's National Prosecuting Authority as part of the ‘unexplainable wealth’ he had amassed over the years. In court papers, Chihuri sensationally claimed that he had a long-standing personal feud with Mnangagwa over a woman, and that his matter was more of a ‘politically targeted persecution’ because he refused to play a part in the coup. However, in 2022, he won a bid to reclaim the palatial home, among other properties, when the state failed to prove that he had siphoned $33m from the state. Chivayo's lawyers, Messrs Manase and Manase, instructed advocate Lewis Uriri to tell News24 that he was a beneficiary of the house bought by a trust. ‘Mr Chivayo is a beneficiary of the owner of the property, having purchased the same. The owner, whose title is being processed, is a trust that, for now, cannot be named,’ said Uriri. In 2004, Chivayo was sentenced to three years in prison for neglecting to pay a South African, who had entered into a rands-for-Zim-dollars deal with him.