A few weeks back, and with a sense of deep satisfaction, I watched television coverage of one Hoosain Mohamed being sent to prison. He was the attorney from hell who ripped off several millions from road accident funds meant for penniless victims. Mohamed’s prey were the naive people of shackland: illiterate, credulous, powerless and mortally injured. Perfect thieving fields for this lump of dog’s excrement who gave the victims little handouts from the healthy cash settlements of the RAF. The major part of their compensation for pain and suffering, loss of limbs, blindness, was tucked away in Mohamed’s secret offshore bank accounts.
Ideally, Hoosain Mohamed and all like him should be taken out of the court and shot. Instead the Cape High Court, in some dubious plea bargain, gave him six years. With the amount of money he’s stolen and still has nestled away, you can be sure Mr Mohamed’s stay in prison will be as short and as comfortable as possible. These days fraudsters regard prison sentences as something akin to post-graduate courses in deep-veined corruption. The prison bosses run the seminars.
It is not stretching things to say that, but for a certain gentleman called Martin Welz and a magazine called noseweek, Mohamed would probably still be carefully hiding documentation behind secret panels in his marble-lined private office lavatory, and an array of guileless cripples would still be funding his extravagant lifestyle.
Had the tracking and investigation of Mohamed’s fraud been left to the police, or even less effective, our pathetic law society, Mohamed would still be out there conning the poor. In the end Welz, an attorney by training, had to explain to three reluctant high court judges why they had to dispatch the sheriff to Mohamed’s offices before he had a chance to destroy evidence.
noseweek turned 10 in October, an event which must have stuck in the craws of legions of the high-level con artists, embezzlers and hustlers who infest South Africa’s commercial world. Many of these finest of commerce’s fine have been turned upside down and shaken, their pockets emptied of illicit profits by this extraordinary little magazine.
The latest edition, number 51, is a noseweek gem. Its lead story exposes some fascinating details about what the magazine describes as a fraud perpetrated by South African Breweries and involving the Black Label trademark. It’s a story which could have some interesting implications — if not a tidy profit — for the taxman.
How did noseweek get this story? Many will remember the bully-boy legal tactics of SABMiller when this vast corporation mounted its extravagant revenge action against the tiny Laugh It Off enterprise, which had dared to produce a few T-shirts parodying the Black Label beer logo. The T-shirt company is now trying to appeal a Cape High Court judgement of precarious legal adequacy. In response, SABMiller has increased its legalised intimidation. Having got its victim down on the ground, SAB has now told its lavish legal team to jump on his face in delight, grind their Gucci hobnails into his mouth. SAB are insisting that, before the appeal can go ahead, the tiny T-shirt company has to put up R340 000 against the possible legal costs of SABMiller. So disgusted was a South African Breweries employee, that a bundle of documents from the SAB group’s secret files landed up at noseweek.
If you have any doubts about the efficiency with which South African Airways is continuing the Coleman Andrews ‘get screwed in our friendly skies” legacy of passenger care, noseweek’s latest edition tries desperately to find signs of ‘intelligent life in SAA”. It prints, in their stupefying entirety, the 21 e-mails it took for a Platinum Voyager member to get a straight answer out of SAA. It’s actually straight out of Kafka.
There’s quite a lot on other leery activities, ranging from the crudely degenerate, the immoral, the shifty, to the pitifully incompetent: Pick ‘n Pay, the land affairs department, the usual array of crooked attorneys, the delightful Ranjeni Munusamy are fried under the n-beam.
How does noseweek get away with it? How does it manage to publish material no one else would touch? I can only believe that it’s because what this remarkable magazine prints is so carefully researched and true that taking it on in court is an option few would welcome. It’s a bit of that and a bit of the other and plenty of good old balls. Whatever. Viva noseweek, Viva! Long may you rain on them — preferably with sulphuric acid.
Some more tempting news from the forthcoming special insert to this paper’s January 1 edition. Not The Mail & Guardian is a collection of the sort of stories and opinions that even noseweek would hesitate to publish. So watch out for news about how Hansie is showing sign of rising from the dead; how Sarafina II is to be revived; startling new theories from a leading South African forensic scientist on the Lockerbie air disaster; the newly announced ANC Racist of the Year Award, and much more.
Not The Mail & Guardian in your first edition of the new year.