Businessman steals $500,000 worth of Copper

Tawanda Mapfumo, a businessman from Harare, the largest city and capital of Zimbabwe, appeared in court yesterday for allegedly stealing a truck full of copper cathodes (example pictured to the left) valued at $500,000.

The copper, amounting to 28,664 tonnes, was unloaded from the stolen trailer and put into the business man’s own trailer and then smuggled into South Africa and sold. Police investigations traced the theft of the copper to one of Mapfumo’s hired workers who smuggled the copper.

The story says that Mapfumo later asked a potential buyer of one his own trailers to tow the stolen trailer to his sister’s house. She became suspicious after noticing its state tags. It appears she alerted police, who later recovered the trailer and charged Mapfumo.

As copper continues to maintain a high price, we will unfortunately continue to see copper stolen by odd people (in this story, a “business man”) in odd ways while making obvious, humorous missteps along the way.

The full story can be read here.