Think of Imelda Marcos and her magnificent collection of shoes. Then think of Grace Mugabe, who while Zimbabwe sinks under the weight of poverty, mass unemployment, hyperinflation and disease, is a one-woman spending machine.

Mrs Mugabe, known as “Dis Grace”, First Shopper and Grasping Grace, certainly lives up to her nicknames. On a trip to Paris in 2003 she spent £75,000 in a day. Gideon Gono, head of Zimbabwe’s central bank, is said to have given her more than £60,000 for her last holiday. She thinks nothing of splashing out nearly £9,000 for a handbag, or £55,000 for marble statues for one of her palaces in Harare.

Dig into Mrs Mugabe’s affairs and you risk more than a handbagging. Last month a Sunday Times photographer, Richard Jones, taking pictures of Zimbabwe’s first lady shopping in Hong Kong, was attacked by her bodyguard and then by the lady herself, using fists adorned with diamond rings the size of knuckledusters.

Last week Sunday Times journalists found a £4m house that she has bought in Hong Kong as a bolthole for her and her husband, the president of Zimbabwe. True to form, the two journalists were attacked by members of Mrs Mugabe’s entourage and needed medical attention. You would think she had something to hide. She does. Apart from her extravagance as the people of Zimbabwe sink further under her husband’s incompetent and corrupt regime, the property purchase appears to fall foul of Hong Kong’s new money-laundering laws.

The Sunday Times has discovered, on top of the Hong Kong purchase, a network of financial deals stretching across some of Asia’s most exotic and luxurious places, in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Mrs Mugabe is planning a money-making venture in China, a multi-million-pound diamond venture at Qingdao, on the country’s east coast.

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe continues to fester. Roy Bennett, the opposition party’s nominee for deputy agriculture minister, was arrested and charged with treason on the first day of the new coalition government, about as inauspicious a start for power-sharing as you could get. Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, will have to work hard to avoid being marginalised by President Mugabe and his thugs.

Mr Tsvangirai says the president is “part of the problem but he’s also part of the solution”. That may be realpolitik, Zimbabwe-style, but it is also deeply unsatisfactory. The truth is that Zimbabwe cannot begin to mend itself until the Mugabes are removed. And if their foreign bank accounts were emptied first, how much sweeter that would be.