Eagle Italian businesses ‘set to reopen’

Former Eagle Italian director Li Song in handcuffs prior to deportation. Photo: NewsHawks.

Marondera, Zimbabwe – Eagle Italian Leather (Pvt) Ltd and Eagle Italian Shoes (Pvt) Ltd, which operate as a combined tanning and footwear manufacturing business and which were set up about 20 years ago to supply the Zimbabwean Government with military boots, are expecting to reopen, director Francesco Marconati said this month.

He said he had been waiting for payment from the government for “close to 2 years”, so he had stopped production, but now “it looks like [their] shoes are finished and [they] have to pay”.

Eagle started out as a tannery only, supplying the leather to another footwear manufacturer to make the boots, but opened its own footwear factory “because I was tired [of supplying someone else who] was making all the money and didn’t pay me”.

Eagle was among a number of businesses owned by Marconati and his former business partner, Li Song, a Chinese businesswoman who held Zimbabwean citizenship, but who was deported in September last year because she was described as “a national security threat” by

Home Affairs minister Kazembe Kazembe, according to a report in NewsHawks.

In a separate court case against him for “fraudulently removing Li as his business partner from the Eagle Italian Shoes directorship”, he was initially sentenced to 2 years in prison, but on 05 December, the conviction was quashed and the sentence set aside.