By Staff Reporter
HARARE – Side Electricals (Pvt) Ltd, trading as Botha Mine, which stands accused of submitting fraudulent survey coordinates and illegally siphoning gold from a rival mining company’s lease, has launched a brazen constitutional court application aimed at shielding itself from accountability by gutting the Minister of Mines and Mining Development, Honourable Polite Kambamura’s regulatory powers.
The application, filed on March 24, 2026 under case number HCH1536/26, is an attempt to derail an imminent cancellation of its mining certificates.
Botha Mine is seeking to have Section 400(1)(c) of the Mines and Minerals Act declared unconstitutional—a law that allows the Minister to cancel mining rights for contraventions of the Gold Trade Act—rather than face the damning evidence of fraud already on record.
The move has been widely condemned as an abuse of court process by a party caught red-handed.The dispute erupted on February 6, 2026, when Freda Rebecca Gold Mine, the legitimate holder of Mining Lease 21 (ML 21), formally applied to the Minister for the cancellation of Botha Mine’s certificates of registration (Numbers 46035 to 46038).
Evidence seen by this publication shows that the application, filed on the same day, was received by the Ministry of Mines through P. Marova on February 6, 2026.
The application is confirmed by an official stamp appearing on the right side of the letter, with handwritten confirmation on upper left side of the letter, indicating that it was duly acknowledged by the Ministry on that date.
The application alleged that Botha Mine had contravened Section 5 of the Gold Trade Act [Chapter 21:03] by fraudulently misrepresenting the location of its mining blocks.
According to the Freda Rebecca application, “Using its certificates of registration for Botha 1-4, the Respondent misrepresented to the mining public the location and extent of those blocks so as to overlap ML 21.”
As a result, “members of the public entered, mined and dealt in gold on ML 21 in the mistaken belief they were operating on Botha 1-4.”
The scheme, according to court documents, saw Botha Mine pocketing 30% of gold proceeds from unsuspecting artisanal miners who believed they were operating legally—all while extracting resources from Freda Rebecca’s lawful lease.
Freda Rebecca Gold Mine is one of the companies falling under the state owned Mutapa Investment Fund.
The scale of the alleged deception was confirmed by a survey diagram drawn by the Ministry of Mines (Mashonaland Central Province).
The Freda Rebecca application states that “the respondent has actually provided fraudulent coordinates to the Provincial office in violation of paragraph 5 of the General Notice 1 of 2025.”
The document further alleges that Botha Mine “mischievously submitted fraudulent ‘surveyed’ coordinates for Botha 1-4. Those coordinates materially deviated from the original registration data and were engineered to shift Botha 1-4 onto portions of ML 21.”
Botha Mine is accused of redrawing its own boundaries on paper to steal ground belonging to another company.
Rather than answer to the allegations of fraud and illegal gold dealing, Botha Mine rushed to the High Court seeking to neuter the Minister’s authority.
In its founding affidavit, signed by Finance Director Ashley Ziyarura Zulu, Botha Mine claims that Section 400(1)(c) infringes on its constitutional right to a fair trial.
Zulu argues that “allowing the 1st Respondent to cancel a mining right without conviction by a criminal court is an infringement.”
This argument has been dismissed by legal observers as disingenuous.
The Minister’s power under Section 400 is administrative and requires an investigation and hearing before any cancellation.
A criminal conviction is not a prerequisite.
Botha Mine is effectively demanding that it be allowed to continue its alleged illegal operations indefinitely while the criminal justice system moves at its own pace.
The desperation is evident in Botha Mine’s own filing, which admits that its mining rights are valued at “over US$30,000,000.00 (Thirty Million United States Dollars).”
A fortune obtained through alleged fraud is now at risk of being lawfully stripped away.
On February 3, 2026, Freda Rebecca’s Managing Director, P. Maseva-Shayawabaya, sent a blistering letter to Botha Mine warning of the consequences of its actions.
“Given the outcome of the survey recently undertaken by the Ministry of Mines and the overwhelming evidence of how you have breached and continue to breach the Gold Trade Act, we place you on notice of our intention to invoke Section 400 of The Mines and Minerals Act,” the letter reads.
“We also reserve our right to institute criminal proceedings for fraud against you.” Freda Rebecca had already begun reasserting control over its property. A public notice dated January 30, 2026, directed all artisanal miners operating on ML 21 to remit payments “ONLY to Freda Rebecca Gold Mine Limited,” explicitly stating that “no payments are to be made to any other person.”
By filing a constitutional challenge to Section 400, Botha Mine is attempting to preempt the Minister’s decision and evade accountability for its alleged crimes.
The application asks the High Court to strike down a law that has long served as a critical enforcement tool for the mining sector, all to protect a single mining house caught with fraudulent coordinates.
The Minister of Mines, Freda Rebecca Gold Mine, and the Attorney General are expected to oppose the application vigorously.
Legal experts suggest Botha Mine’s constitutional argument stands on shaky ground, and that the courts are unlikely to entertain a challenge brought by a party seeking to escape the consequences of its own apparent misconduct.
For now, Botha Mine remains accused of running an elaborate scheme to defraud both Freda Rebecca Gold Mine and the artisanal miners who were unwittingly drawn into its web.
