What they found was not just a residential property, but a full-scale, illegal gold mining operation that had been hollowed out from within over the course of four years. Chiripai Chipandire and his associate, Douglas Walsh, allegedly approached the owner of the Marlborough property, Tinashe Rwodzi, with a tale of “buried treasure.” The prosecution argues that even after being ordered to stop by the Ministry of Mines, Chipandire continued to employ men to dig and blast. She warned that gold mining there had left a massive trench stretching up to ten kilometres, posing a serious flooding risk to nearby communities and schools. Timeline of the Marlborough Mining Scandal:2022: The illegal mining operation begins under the guise of searching for “buried treasure.”