Van Hoogstraten walks free from jail

The notorious British property tycoon Nicholas van Hoogstraten, arrested last week in Harare on currency and pornography charges, was released from custody yesterday on the orders of the Zimbabwe High Court, amid speculation that he may have fallen out with his old friend President Robert Mugabe. After spending five nights in a filthy, overcrowded jail, the 62-year-old multi-millionaire left court along with his girlfriend, Nyasha Gora, 40 years his junior.

One of Zimbabwe's biggest landowners, Hoogstraten is accused of charging rent on his 200-plus Zimbabwean properties in foreign currency instead of worthless Zimbabwean dollars. Both he and Gora are further charged with being in possession of 150 photos, discovered in Hoogstraten's bedroom, of "young Zimbabwean girls photographed in nude, semi-nude, and some in compromising sexual positions which were found to be obscene".

Hoogstraten's arrest has puzzled Harare because he is a long-term supporter of Mugabe - he once described the president as "100 per cent decent and incorruptible" - and, as such, would be expected to be immune from interference. But Moses Moyo, who writes The First Post's Zimbabwe Today column, reports that sources within the police and the ruling Zanu-PF party say there has been growing suspicion that Hoogstraten has changed his political allegiance.

After years of supporting Zanu-PF financially, he is thought to have become close to Solomon Mujuru and the faction now openly opposed to Mugabe's continuing grip on power. One source told Moyo: "This year he did not pour so much money into the funds, and this raised suspicions that he was diverting it elsewhere."

Hoogstraten claimed via his lawyer that there was nothing political about his arrest, saying: "The misconception which might arise in the press or elsewhere that I have fallen out with the Zimbabwean authorities is utterly false." However, he offered no other explanation for the police action and claimed the charges against him and his girlfriend were a "deliberate and malicious entrapment scheme".

Hoogstraten, who made his first million by his early 20s, is no stranger to jail. He spent four years in Wormwood Scrubs in the 1960s after ordering a grenade attack on the home of a business associate who owed him money. In 2002 he was sentenced to 10 years for manslaughter after Mohammed Raja was shot dead by two of his henchmen. The conviction was later quashed by the Court of Appeal and he was freed in 2003. When Raja's family later brought a civil action against him, High Court judges ruled that "on the balance of probability Hoogstraten was involved in the murder" and ordered him to pay £500,000 interim costs. Hoogstraten, typically defiant, vowed that Raja's family would "never get a penny".

As well as homes in Zimbabwe, Barbados, St Lucia, Florida and Cannes, Hoogstraten has built himself a £40m mansion in Sussex called Hamilton Place. It is bigger than Buckingham Palace and includes a mausoleum designed to hold Hoogstraten's body for 5,000 years. The sooner he makes use of it the better from the point of view of Mr Raja's family, the families of the five tenants who died when one of his properties in Brighton caught fire – he called them 'scum' - and now, possibly, of Mugabe, in whom Hoogstraten may have met his match.