The British government plans to reject a European Union decision to lift sanctions on the wife of the late Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, suggesting its approach to financially targeting foreign individuals will diverge from the bloc's, the Sunday Telegraph reports.
The U.K. suspended an order freezing the assets of Grace Mugabe after the EU's decision last week, because it's bound to follow the bloc's sanctions decisions until the Brexit transition period expires at year's end. Yet the British government disagreed with the decision and plans to reimpose sanctions on Mugabe once the transition period is over, the newspaper reported, without saying where it got the information.
On Monday, the bloc renewed its arms embargo against Zimbabwe and will maintain a targeted assets-freeze against the state-controlled armaments company, Zimbabwe Defence Industries. Restrictive measures were initially introduced in 2002 in response to serious human rights violations by Mugabe's government.
A spokesman for the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office told the newspaper: “We did not agree with the EU's decision to suspend these sanctions on Grace Mugabe. At the end of the transition period we will review it.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Ritchie in London at gritchie10@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Dana El Baltaji at delbaltaji@bloomberg.net, Amy Teibel, Todd White
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