A series of revelations about a recent spate of epic pay awards for strategic public servants in Zimbabwe is causing a scandal, but as the pay is legal they may exonerate PEPs who want to invest abroad from suspicion on the part of anti-money-laundering staff.

A series of revelations about a recent spate of epic pay awards for strategic public servants in Zimbabwe is causing a scandal, but as they are legal they may exonerate PEPs who want to invest abroad from suspicion on the part of anti-money-laundering staff.

Zimbabweans tolerate corporate corruption by and large, but when it emerged in the media that Happison Muchechetere, the CEO of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, was earning 40,000 US dollars a month in salary, bonuses, benefits-in-kind and pension contributions, there was uproar. Many of his staff had not been paid for six months when he was suspended from his job - on full pay - pending an audit.

The senior management of the Public Sector Medical Aid Society are being paid even more handsomely. The Herald recently reported that Premier Service Medical Aid Society group chief executive Dr Cuthbert Dube and the society’s board chairperson, Mrs Meisie Makeletso Namasasu, had been 'booted out' after it was revealed that Dube’s salary was US$230 000 per month. The group’s finance manager, Mr Enock Gwinyai (another casualty of the clampdown) earned a basic annual salary of $200 000. The group’s operations executive Mr Enock Chitekedza was on $122,000 a month while eight other senior directors were on $60,000 every month.

After that scandal broke, it emerged that the 18-man management team in charge of Harare’s municipal affairs were pocketing almost US$500,000 a month between them, according to the Zimbabwean. The Town Clerk (now suspended) was earning $37,000 a month. The city council has more than 10,300 employees and about 64 managers, but a good 70% of money earmarked for salaries goes to the managers.

The source of these revelations, more often than not, is a 'whistle-blower'. Money-laundering reporting officers, however, are likely to hear the true figures from the PEPs themselves as they apply for bank accounts. MLROs have previously assumed that any overt display of wealth by an African PEP is grotesquely out of kilter with the office-holder's salary, but in the case of Zimbabwe this appears to be ceasing to be true.

Mywage.org tracks PEPs' salaries throughout the world, with a special emphasis on Africa. There is a section called 'public wages around the world'. At the moment it is running a feature on the upgraded salaries of the Kenyan civil service.

Readers might find the following list of politicians' annual salaries (not monthly, as in the case of Zimbabwe) amusing to look through. Some are so famous that their countries of origin have been left out. Most are in euros, although some of the Asia Pacific figures are in US dollars.

Barack Obama €298,507

Angela Merkel €290,000

François Hollande €178,920

Mario Monti €211,502

Pope Francis €0

Ex-pope Benedict €30,000

David Cameron €170,000

Vladimir Putin [the richest man in Russia] €131,103

Dmitri Medvedev €74,711

Christina Frenandez de Kirchner [Pres, Argentina] €41,772

Herman van Rompuy €376,471

Robert Mugabe €13,433

Sebastián Piñera [Pres, Chile] €133,043

Boyko Birosov [PM, Bulgaria] €21,894

Mark Rutte [PM, Holland] €144,108

Hamid Karzai €4,701

Borut Pahor [PM, Slovenia] €36,000

Tayyip Erdogan [PM, Turkey] €54,851

Juan Manuel Santos [Pres, Colombia] €83,638

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf [Pres, Liberia] €67,164

Jacob Zuma €189,643

Lee Myung-bak [Pres, S Korea] €120,896

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono [Pres, Indonesia] €92,665

Horacio Cartes [Pres, Paraguay] €76,912

Lee Hsien Loong [PM, Singapore] $1,650,000

Donald Tsang [Chief Executive, Hong Kong] $550,000

Julia Gillard [PM, Australia] $495,000

Yoshihiko Noda [PM, Japan] $316,000

John Key [PM, NZ] $310,000

Ma Ying-jeou [Pres,Taiwan] $184,000