Angella Johnson
The “general” who was given 1% of Virodene’s parent company for African National Congress “introductions work” claims he actually received the share as a gift from Ziggy and Olga Visser for helping them make contact with prominent black businesspeople.
Documents used to attack the ANC this week for its alleged involvement in the company said that Joshua Nxomalo would receive 1% for introducing its directors to the party.
Nxomalo, a former non-ranking Umkhonto weSizwe cadre, says although he knows Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and other ANC members, he did not arrange for them to contact the Virodene founders.
“I may have introduced the shareholders to prominent people who then introduced them to the government. But in any case, I don’t see where the ANC has done anything for the company,” he insists.
Mbeki last December brokered peace when warring factions within Cyropreservation Technologies threatened the project.
Nxomalo claims Ziggy Visser wrote the document stating that the ANC would receive 6% under pressure from other partners baying for a complete disclosure of the company’s affairs late last year.
“It was done in haste and was merely an interim working paper. Ziggy told me he had said this in a state of confusion and had really meant to say Reconstruction and Development Programme, or some other kind of black empowerment.”
Nxomalo, who runs a Johannesburg-based construction company, says he became interested in finding a cure for HIV and Aids after seeing several of his former ANC comrades die from the virus they had contracted in exile.
“This thing is killing black people in droves, and we want to ensure a cure gets to them quickly and cheaply. The Vissers wanted to bring in black businessmen who might want to invest in Virodene.”
Nxomalo says that thus far none of the potential black investors has taken the bait. “They did not trust the way the company was structured.”
Neither, it seems, did shareholder Carl Landauer, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Pretoria University, who went to court to try to have Ziggy Visser removed as manager of the company.
Landauer accuses the Vissers of running the company as if it were their own personal fiefdom, and claims other political groups had also been earmarked for free shares.
“We became suspicious that the corporation had been involved in irregular and irresponsible dealing. We wanted to make sure no kickbacks were offered. That’s why we went to court last November – and thank God, or we might not have uncovered this,” he said.