Zim businessman arrested for defrauding patner over half a million dollars.

A Zimbabwean businessman Fradreck Utsiwegota was recently dragged to the courts following allegations of defrauding his Singaporean business patner over half a million US dollars. He is facing charges of fraud.

It is the state case that Fradreck Utsiwegota and his patner Ramson Bupendra registered a company called Decade mining Pvt LTD sometime in 2012. A year later, Bupendra left for Singapore to attend to his other businesses. He entrusted the company to Utsiwegota and left him in charge.

It is alleged that Utsiwegota seized this opportunity to sell the company assets in the absence of Bupendra. Amongst items sold include a Toyota Hilux, Mazda 3, Foton Seven tonne truck and other mining equipment worth US 517 000. He pocketed all the proceeds of the sale.

To conceal his illegal shenanigans, Utsiwegota cast fears on Bupendra that he could not return to Zimbabwe because of political interference. He claimed that Bupendra’s life was in danger. Bupendra only managed to return to Zimbabwe last year after getting ind of the president’s mantra that Zimbabwe was now on for business. To his horror, he found the company in shambles with most of its equipment gone.

His first port of call was to approach the high court to obtain an interdict to stop Utsiwegota from further selling any more equipment. He then dragged him to court on allegations of fraud. Utsiwegota was granted 500 rtgs bail by a Bindura Magistrate. His bail conditions included him surrendering his passport, reporting twice a week at Highlands police station and non interference with witnesses.