A Live Example: Botswana's $30 Billion Question About When Due Diligence Should Happen
A necessary note before anything else: this is not a claim that any company here has done anything wrong. It's a live example of a much narrower, and completely separate, question: when should due diligence happen relative to a signature?
A necessary note before anything else: this post makes no claim that any company or individual involved has done anything wrong. What's playing out in Botswana right now is a live, unresolved example of a much narrower question, one this site has written about before in the abstract: when should due diligence happen relative to a signature, not after it?
What's actually happening, as of this writing
Botswana's government, through the Botswana Investment and Trade Centre, has been engaging a company called Zotus Group over a proposed development called Zotus City, a large-scale project pitched at $30 to $50 billion in investment, positioned to include logistics, aviation, tourism, renewable energy, and smart agriculture near Ghanzi. Zotus Group first engaged the Botswana government in 2020, and the company signed memoranda of understanding with BITC, the Trans-Kalahari Corridor Secretariat, and the Ghanzi District Council during a 2025 investment expo.
According to reporting on recent parliamentary proceedings, opposition members pressed the government on the timing of its own verification process, and officials confirmed that a due diligence visit to the company's UK offices, involving BITC, the Botswana High Commission in London, and Botswana's security agencies, took place only recently, after the MOUs were already signed. The opposition's specific criticism, as reported, was that verification should have preceded the agreements rather than followed them.
Separately, BITC's chief executive has publicly stated, after that review, that the project appears credible, and that Zotus Group International is registered with the UK's Companies House as a holding and investment structuring vehicle. Public skepticism about the project, including on social media, has been significant enough that BITC felt the need to address it directly and by name.
Why this is worth writing about regardless of how it turns out
This is genuinely a live, unresolved situation, and it may well end with a real, completed project. That's exactly why it's a useful example rather than a cautionary tale: the criticism being reported isn't "this company is fraudulent." It's narrower and, honestly, more universally applicable: verification happened after commitment, not before. That sequencing question is worth examining independently of whatever the eventual outcome turns out to be.
This is precisely the pattern examined in why newly elected and existing governments alike remain vulnerable to this specific sequencing risk: political pressure to show progress on a high-profile investment creates a real institutional pull toward signing first and verifying later, and that pull exists whether or not the counterparty turns out to be legitimate.
What a properly sequenced process looks like
None of the following implies anything was done incorrectly here specifically; it's the general standard worth naming while this is a live, current example:
- Corporate registration and standing verified before any agreement is signed, not treated as a follow-up step. A UK Companies House registration is genuinely easy to confirm independently, quickly, and doesn't require a delegation to travel to verify.
- Financial capacity for a project of the stated scale checked against independent sources, not solely against the pitch itself, particularly when the stated figures reach into the tens of billions.
- Public communication calibrated to what's actually been verified at each stage, since public skepticism, once it reaches the level of a government having to respond to it directly, is itself a cost regardless of the eventual outcome.
See our fuller breakdown of what should be verified before a government signs an MOU with a foreign investor for the complete list.
Why this doesn't belong in our pattern register
We maintain a sourced register of documented fraudulent-pitch patterns, and we're deliberately not adding this case to it. That register requires either a court conviction, an official regulatory advisory, or credible investigative reporting making an actual finding, not public debate about process or timing. Nothing here meets that bar, and nothing here should be read as suggesting it does. What's genuinely useful about this case is narrower and doesn't depend on the eventual outcome: it's a live, current illustration of a sequencing risk, not evidence of anything else.
The takeaway, independent of what happens next
Whatever Zotus City becomes, the general lesson holds either way: verification that happens after a public commitment has already been made is verification that arrives too late to actually change the decision, only to inform how the fallout, if there is any, gets managed. Scrutinex exists to move that verification earlier, before an agreement is signed rather than after. See a sample report or order one before your next commitment, not after it.