Mnangagwa's Angel suffers Gold Mafia blow

PRESIDENT Emmerson Mnangagwa's ambassador-at-large Uebert Angel, born Uebert Madzanire has been banned from YouTube after he allegedly attempted to pull down Al Jazeera's Gold Mafia investigative documentary which exposed him as a key player in alleged gold and money laundering activities in Zimbabwe.

The four-part investigative series also purported that Mnangagwa had a close relationship with gold smugglers and money launderers, who claimed they were making regular payments to the President to ensure protection.

Data analyst Team Pachedu told NewsDay that Angel tried to remove the content several times before being banned from YouTube for violating the terms of service.

"When you make a complaint, YouTube automatically notifies the other party that somebody is violating its copyright for IT (information technology) to get videos. So the other party is involved throughout the process of what's going on.

"That's how we managed to know because we knew the party that was involved. Angel has been trying to send requests in an attempt to remove Gold Mafia content until YouTube banned him," Team Pachedu said.

Team Pachedu said Angel was now desperately luring people to follow him on Facebook.

"Right now he is using another channel called UebertAngelplus on Facebook which was not being used. They have managed to load over 100 videos in the past three days, but the main account has been banned, which was YouTube," Team Pachedu said.

Team Pachedu also published a letter written by YouTube addressed to Angel giving reasons why they refused to remove the content from the platform.

"Hi Uebert Angel, We are concerned that your copyright notification may not be valid for some or all of the videos identified in your notification," partly read the letter.

"Please keep in mind that in many countries, it is legal to use copyrighted works in specific ways without the owner's authorisation, particularly for transformative purposes such as news reporting, parody, commentary, or review.

"Some countries protect such uses under doctrines of ‘fair use' or ‘fair dealing', while others allow for specific exceptions to copyright protection."

Efforts to get a comment from Angel were fruitless.

Last month, Angel through his lawyer Lovemore Madhuku, dismissed allegations made against him by the documentary, saying his words and actions were never real but a classified national intelligence operation which was staged.