“We don’t know where we’re going to go.”

The 44-year-old, who claims to be a prophet and heads a congregation — the Good News Church — with branches in 15 countries, said he would facilitate a scheme through which unaccounted cash could be exchanged for Zimbabwe’s gold. Recipients of the gold could then sell the precious metal for legitimate money, effectively turning their cash clean.Angel and his business partner Rikki Doolan also claimed that their laundering operations had the approval of Mnangagwa, who has been in power since November 2017, when Zimbabwe’s controversial former leader Robert Mugabe was ousted in a military coup.

“You want gold, gold we can do it right now, we can make the call right now, and it’s done,” Angel told Al Jazeera’s reporters. “It will land in Zimbabwe — Zimbabwe can’t touch it too until I get to my house. So, there can be a diplomatic plan.”“So, it is a very, very easy thing,” he said.Angel made the offer during an operation that was part of ‘Gold Mafia’, an investigation into several gold-smuggling gangs in Southern Africa, with Zimbabwe and South Africa as key hubs.

The investigation reveals how these gangs have turned Western sanctions meant to target Zimbabwe’s government into an opportunity to smuggle large quantities of gold and launder hundreds of millions of dollars through a complex web of companies and bribes.Al Jazeera reporters, posing as Chinese nationals who were looking to launder large sums of money, were offered several ways to remove all stains of corruption from their dirty cash.

Among those mechanisms was the use of Angel’s diplomatic clout. Officially, the pastor-diplomat is tasked with finding investors to come to Zimbabwe. However, Angel made it clear that he was willing to help smuggle gold and launder money.

Zimbabwe needs dollars because the country’s own currency has lost its value in international trade due to hyperinflation. A commodity like gold is a good way to earn dollars, but international sanctions imposed on the country make it difficult for the government to export gold because of the additional scrutiny on officials in power.While customs data does not formally distinguish between imports based on whether they were authorised by the manufacturer, importing companies that have no official relationship with the manufacturer are an indication of parallel imports.

In the weeks after the invasion, shipments of iPhones to Russia virtually ceased.Only about 200kg (440 pounds) of the devices - the equivalent of about 400 iPhones - were imported into Russia in the first three months after the invasion, according to Russian import data provided by Import Genius, compared with about 200 tonnes in January 2022 alone.

By summer, shipments began to slowly recover. But imports never returned to pre-invasion levels, peaking at about one-third of that amount at the end of 2022, before declining again over the following six months.“Apple stopped selling products in Russia in March 2022 and there’s been no change since then”, Apple told Al Jazeera in a statement, declining to comment on unofficial distribution channels.