Andrew Phillips, owner of The Ranch brothel in Johannesburg, sued George Fredrick Hardaker, a senior special investigator with the Scorpions and member of the asset forfeiture unit, for R500 000 in the Johannesburg High Court this week.
Phillips brought a defamation suit against Hardaker because of an affidavit Hardaker deposed in February last year that the asset forfeiture unit used to justify seizing Phillips’s assets.
In the affidavit Hardaker cast doubt on Phillips’s anti-drugs stance and implied that the brothel owner was associated with international drug trafficking.
Hardaker suggested that a long-standing friendship between Phillips and a South African known as ”Sailor”, who was arrested in New Zealand for dealing in ecstasy and cocaine in 1999, cast aspersions on Phillips’s character.
”Phillips has gone out of his way to deny he is involved in drug trafficking. He has held himself out as an ardent opponent of drug trafficking,” Hardaker stated in his affidavit. ”Based on the evidence [that Phillips travelled to New Zealand at the request of Sailor’s parents to help their son at his trial in New Zealand] I submit that [Phillips’s] supposed protestations against drugs should not be taken too seriously.”
Advocate Mike Smithers, acting for Phillips, questioned his client about his attitude towards drugs.
”I have never taken drugs, drunk alcohol or smoked in my life,” Phillips answered. ”I had an anti-drug policy statement that hung in about 20 places around The Ranch outlawing the use, possession, the peddling, discussion and glorification of drugs. At The Ranch I was only too aware of the lure for people involved in the industry, like the sex workers at The Ranch, to get involved in that lifestyle.”
The trial continues.