Nicholas van Hoogstraten, the British property tycoon, is to appear before a Harare magistrate today on charges of illegal dealing in foreign currency and possessing pornography, police said yesterday.

He is expected to be taken to court by police after three nights in custody. He was arrested in a police raid on his home in the exclusive suburb of Emerald Hill.

Police were apparently acting on a complaint from a woman tenant at one of Mr van Hoogstraten’s many apartment blocks in Harare. She said that she had been forced to pay $8,000 (£4,000) in hard currency as six months’ rent in advance. Zimbabwean law forbids charging foreign currency for local goods and services.

In the search of his home police also said they found $38,000; 93,000 South African rand and small amounts of other currencies, in apparent violation of Zimbabwe’s draconian currency laws that allow only very small sums of foreign cash to be held.

They also said they found Z$20 billion, which in Zimbabwe’s crashing economy – with inflation estimated at 150,000 per cent – is worth £2,000 at the black market exchange rate, in which even the central bank deals. The maximum amount of local currency that can be held legally in Zimbabwe is Z$500 million, the equivalent of £50.

Police also said they found “pornographic material” – without specifying what form it took – featuring him with a 22-year-old woman.

Mr van Hoogstraten has had close connections with President Mugabe and his Zanu (PF) party for more than a decade and is one of a handful of whites regarded as “a friend” of the ruling establishment. He has been admired for investing huge sums of money in an economy other Western investors will not touch.

He once described Mr Mugabe as “100 per cent decent and incorruptible”. With these qualifications, observers believe that the manner of his highly publicised arrest means that he has fallen badly out of favour with the rulers of his adopted country. His case has all the signs of a deliberate degradation reserved for those regarded as turncoats or enemies of the ruling party. There has been no indication of what he may have done to offend.

He was paraded on state television in police custody, holding out wads of his cash. His weekend in custody is likely to have been an appalling experience as Zimbabwean police cells are notoriously excrement-smeared, urine-drenched and lice-ridden.

None of the offences for which he was arrested carries a jail term. The worst that he could expect would be to forfeit the foreign currency and pay fines for being in possession of the currency and the alleged pornography, said Beatrice Mtetwa, the president of the Zimbabwe Law Society.

It was highly unlikely that the pornography charges would stick, she said. “He should not have been arrested and locked up for the weekend. The amounts and severity of the offences involved are relatively minor, as are the fines he could be expected to pay, so he’s unlikely to abscond,” she added. “It has become common for the police to treat people in this way, to punish them before they have even gone to court.”

A COLOURFUL PAST

— Nicholas van Hoogstraten was born in 1945; left school at 16; joined the Navy

— Sold stamp collection at 17 for £1,000; began a property business

— Sentenced to four years in prison in 1968 for ordering grenade attack on home of a business associate

— Jailed in 2004 over killing of a business rival. Freed on appeal

— Fined £1,500 in 2001 for contempt of court for telling the opposing counsel: “You dirty bastard . . . in due course, you are going to have it”

— Has described his politics as being “to the right of Atilla the Hun”

— Has five children by three women

Sources: Times Archives, Agencies

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