Zimbabwe Arrests Chinese National Over Alleged 720-Tonne Lithium Smuggling Scheme

The Anti-Corruption Commission says the suspect ran an illicit processing site outside Harare that stockpiled and exported unbeneficiated lithium ore using fraudulent documents.

Zimbabwe's Anti-Corruption Commission has arrested Ning Yaokun, a Chinese national known locally as Tony, over allegations he ran a syndicate that smuggled more than 720 tonnes of unbeneficiated lithium ore out of the country using fraudulent export documents. Yaokun, a director of Orequest (Pvt) Ltd, surrendered to authorities on September 10 and faces charges including violating the Customs and Excise Act, attempted smuggling, and unlawful dealing; he's expected to appear before the Harare Magistrates' Court. According to ZACC, Yaokun set up the operation in December 2025 at a leased six-hectare site in Ruwa, installing jaw crushers, a front-end loader, and other processing equipment, hiring local workers, and stockpiling lithium ore from April 2026 before allegedly exporting it under falsified paperwork. He joins several other suspects already on remand in the same case, including Orequest's finance director and two other individuals. The case lands squarely in a familiar pattern across Zimbabwe's lithium sector, where the country holds some of Africa's largest reserves of a mineral central to the global battery supply chain, and where weak enforcement against unbeneficiated raw-ore exports has repeatedly let value that should stay in the country leave through under-the-radar operations like this one.