By Gift Kugara Mawire
A confidential strategic analysis by Zimbabwe’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), approved in November 2025 and reviewed by this publication, concludes that a significant portion of the country’s extraordinary boom in fuel stations and gas outlets is not driven by consumer demand but by organised gold-smuggling syndicates using petroleum imports to wash criminal proceeds back into the economy.
The figures alone are arresting. Between 2012 and 2024, the number of licensed fuel retail stations in Zimbabwe grew by 335 percent. Liquefied petroleum gas retailers grew by 918 percent over a shorter period. Yet over the same years, national fuel consumption stayed essentially flat, and the upstream sectors : production, wholesale, blending barely moved. Something other than demand, the FIU concludes, is building these forecourts.
That something, according to the report, is dirty money looking for a home.
The Mechanism
The FIU, working alongside the country’s tax authority, central bank, state oil company and criminal investigations department, describes a cycle that is almost elegant in its construction. Gold is mined often by unlicensed artisanal miners and smuggled across the border into South Africa. There it is sold for rand, with proceeds deposited into offshore bank accounts controlled by a network of couriers. Those couriers, frequently operating through shell companies registered in South Africa using forged identity documents, then pay South African fuel and gas suppliers on behalf of Zimbabwean importers.
The product is trucked into Zimbabwe on South African-registered tankers, sometimes moving multiple loads under a single customs document to avoid detection. Zimbabwean wholesalers receive the fuel or gas and pay in United States dollars in cash, on delivery, or by depositing the proceeds into safe deposit boxes held by the couriers. Some of the cash, the report notes, is handed directly to real estate developers in Harare. The US dollars then flow back to the smugglers, who use them to buy more gold from local miners, and the loop closes.
This is textbook trade-based money laundering: the goods are real, the invoices are real, but the value moving behind them is criminal.
A US$6.7 Billion Pipeline and Where the Money Actually Goes
Between January 2020 and March 2025, Zimbabwe paid at least US$6.7 billion for fuel and LPG imports through formal banking channels. The biggest recipients were not oil-producing nations but financial centres — the United Kingdom received over US$2 billion, Mauritius US$1.56 billion, Switzerland US$1.19 billion. The report accepts that routing payments through such jurisdictions is standard industry practice for major traders, but flags that it creates structural opacity that illicit actors exploit.
More troubling are the payments that don’t go through banks at all. The FIU describes fuel and gas transactions settled via hawala informal value-transfer networks that leave no banking footprint particularly in the LPG trade where South African and Emirati offshore accounts figure prominently.
The Mining Towns Tell the Story
If anyone doubted the gold connection, the geography makes it hard to dismiss. Kadoma, Chegutu and Kwekwe all gold-mining towns have some of the densest concentrations of new fuel stations per square kilometre in the country. Many sell fuel below what the report calls “sub-economic prices.” A significant number, according to the FIU, operate without functional bank accounts at all. The authority’s own map shows Harare with 327 retail sites and Mashonaland West, another mining belt, close behind.
Established, long-standing fuel dealers are being squeezed out. The report documents retail sites where monthly sales have collapsed from 300,000 litres to 120,000 litres, with some operators closing stations they’ve run for decades. Legitimate traders told investigators they believe they are being driven out by competitors funded with criminal proceeds. Operators who don’t need to make a profit on fuel because the fuel itself is a laundering vehicle.
Not Just Gold
The report identifies parallel abuses. Government contractors who were supposed to supply fuel for official projects in local currency have been diverting that fuel to the open market and selling it in US dollars, pocketing the gap between official and parallel exchange rates. A telecommunications company that received US$12.6 million in government funding allegedly channelled US$4 million through a fuel station to access USD cash, with no evidence of legitimate telecom spending. Another company registered itself with a name resembling a government ministry and used the confusion to import millions of litres of fuel duty-free.
One importer, the report states, brought in fuel falsely declared as naphthalene, a household chemical despite having closed bank accounts, suggesting an entirely cash-based operation.
Regulatory Gaps the Report Calls Out
The FIU is unusually candid about failures in its own system. Retail fuel licences require no proof of funding and no criminal background checks. There is no national zoning policy, which is why stations have proliferated deep inside residential neighbourhoods where property owners are paid premiums to convert land use. Data held by the energy regulator, the tax authority and the state oil infrastructure company doesn’t reconcile. There is no whistleblower protection law and the report notes that several industry insiders refused to speak freely during the investigation because of it.
What the FIU Wants Done
The recommendations are substantial. They include integrating customs systems with the central bank’s foreign payments system so that imports paid for outside banking channels become visible. Amending the Bank Use Promotion Act to prohibit local cash transactions above US$10,000. Formally licensing or regulating hawala operators rather than pretending they don’t exist. Introducing fuel marking to stop misclassification fraud. Requiring beneficial ownership disclosure for all new retail licences. Tightening oversight of asset management companies, which the report identifies as conduits for large USD cash movements.
Why This Matters Beyond Zimbabwe
Trade-based money laundering of this kind isn’t a Zimbabwean peculiarity. The Financial Action Task Force has flagged it globally as one of the hardest forms of financial crime to detect, precisely because the goods are real. But the FIU’s report is rare in its specificity, a national financial intelligence body openly naming the sector, the mechanism, the foreign jurisdictions involved, and the weaknesses in its own regulatory architecture. For regional partners, particularly South Africa, where the report alleges fake-ID shell companies are operating fuel export businesses, the implications are uncomfortable.
Zimbabwe’s fuel pumps, in other words, are telling a story about a regional criminal economy. The FIU has put that story on paper. The question now is whether anyone acts on it.
Source: Financial Intelligence Unit of Zimbabwe, “Strategic Analysis Study on Suspected Money Laundering through the Distribution of Fuel and Liquefied Petroleum Gas in Zimbabwe,” approved 25 November 2025. This article summarises findings from the FIU’s confidential strategic analysis and attributes all claims to the report.
Comments
About Author
