Mugabe's delight at Hoogstraten release

Mugabe's delight at Hoogstraten release

HOOGSTRATEN

• Mugabe financier Hoogstraten out of jail

By Christopher Walker
13/12/03
BEST wishes from Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe, may not be sought in many quarters, but for Nicholas van Hoogstraten, Britain’s most notorious property developer and one of the African nation’s largest landowners, it clearly means a lot.

The despotic President was one of the first to congratulate him on his release from jail this week, Mr van Hoogstraten claimed yesterday, after the quashing of his conviction for arranging the death of a business rival, Mohammed Raja, 62. The multimillionaire served only 13 months of a ten-year sentence at Belmarsh high-security prison where, he disclosed, he had been trained as a "listener" by Samaritans.

During an interview with his local paper, the Brighton Evening Argus, Mr van Hoogstraten, 58, once described by a judge as a "self-appointed emissary of Beelzebub", displayed a certificate received from the organisation set up in 1953 as a 999 phone service counselling potential suicides.

HM Prison Service Document 10380 declared: "This is to certify that Nick van Hoogstraten has been trained by The Samaritans of Bexley/Bromley in listening and befriending skills at HM Prison Belmarsh."

Mr van Hoogstraten, from Uckfield, East Sussex, was freed after a legal battle during which he argued successfully that the judge had made a mistake and had misdirected the jury at the original trial where he had been found guilty of manslaughter.

The Court of Appeal ruled that an Old Bailey judge’s unchallengeable ruling that Mr van Hoogstraten should not face retrial on a manslaughter charge thwarted the interests of justice.

"Those interests require that Mr van Hoogstraten be retried," said Lord Justice Kennedy, sitting with Mr Justice Curtis and Mr Justice Forbes. But, as the law stood, he added, the court was powerless to entertain an appeal by the prosecution against the decision of the retrial judge, Sir Stephen Mitchell, that Mr van Hoogstraten had no case to answer.

In the interview, Mr van Hoogstraten who is one of the largest landowners in Zimbabwe, where he acquired 218,000 hectares (540,000 acres) of farmland in the 1990s, denied claims that his property had been seized by black squatters. He said that he was still accumulating assets, including a coalmine, in Zimbabwe. He is also building a grandiose second palace there to match the £30 million Hamilton Palace he was constructing - until imprisonment interrupted the works - in the Sussex countryside as a mausoleum and home to his valuable art collection.

In a hint of a conversion, Mr van Hoogstraten told the paper he had learnt from his time in jail. "I have been too straightforward in the past. If you are, you are going to get hammered. I have been learning and Belmarsh is a good place for learning," he said.

Mr van Hoogstraten, whose precise worth is now unknown but who at the time of his trial was named as one of Britain’s richest men with a fortune estimated at more than £500 million, claimed that while inside he had helped a number of inmates who he felt had also been wrongly convicted.

"I am a good listener," he added.

Among those he advised was a Jamaican "Yardie" gangster, who was freed last month after being acquitted of a murder in South London, although he is now back behind bars awaiting deportation. Mr van Hoogstraten spent his time in the high-security wing of Belmarsh and boasted that he could have escaped had he wanted to.

"I could have got out, but I wanted to stay and prove my innocence," he said.

Instead, he spent his time studying the law, giving tips to fellow prisoners as well as sharing his knowledge of the stock market with them and the officers.

He tried to rebut suggestions that he was a slum landlord, claiming to have sold most of his properties, and he insisted that his tenants would be overjoyed by his release.

"I am all right as long as you do not upset me," Mr van Hoogstraten, trained listener and befriender, added - The Times
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