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Price Controls and Shortages - Index of articles
Zimbabwe
store owner jailed for defying price controls
Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA)
August 17, 2007
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/africa/news/article_1344208.php/Zimbabwe_store_owner_jailed_for_defying_
price_controls
A court in Zimbabwe
has sentenced a businesswoman to a year in jail for flouting price
controls as the police chief vowed to press on with raids on stores
for allegedly overcharging, reports said Friday.
Gertrude Nyabadza,
the owner of Better Class Supermarket in the eastern town of Rusape,
is the first person to be jailed since President Robert Mugabe's
government ordered prices cut by at least 50 per cent more than
six weeks ago.
The magistrate
who sentenced Nyabadza called her an unrepentant and unethical businesswoman,
with little regard for the law, said the state-controlled Herald
newspaper.
Meanwhile the
country's police chief Augustine Chihuri was quoted by the Herald
as saying the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) would continue its
blitz on high prices.
'Those who have
been masquerading as pearls of economic wisdom by posting astronomical
profits while the public is suffering will be exposed for what they
are, Chihuri was quoted as saying.
'As ZRP we will
not tire until this vicious criminal phenomenon is eliminated,'
he said.
But Chihuri,
who was speaking at a handover ceremony of donations from the business
community to a regional police sports contest being held in Harare,
hastened to add that Zimbabwean police were not at war with the
business community.
'There is no
war between us and business,' he said. The governments blitz on
prices was aimed at ensuring moral rectitude is restored in the
business community, he said.
Mugabe has said
high prices in the country are a plot to cause civil unrest aimed
at unseating his government. But the business community says prices
are only in line with record high inflation which analysts say could
now have reached 13,000 per cent.
The Harare government
has announced that it is now mulling a new law that would make it
a criminal offence for businesses to engage in what it calls profiteering.
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