The South African Revenue Service (Sars) has identified a staggering R226-million diverted via suspect share transactions for the benefit of murdered mining magnate Brett Kebble.
And some of the assets appear to have been moved under the name of a former Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB) agent.
The R226-million figure is drawn from documents lodged with a Sars claim against the Kebble estate amounting to R186-million.
And it was only a fraction of the value of assets belonging to Kebble’s JCI group investigators believe were “dissipated” to prop up his businesses and his patronage networks. The full figure is believed to be about R1-billion.
Court papers filed by Peter Gray, the man appointed by Investec to clean up the financial mess left by Kebble, have disclosed one example of how the scam worked — in this case, amounting to R35-million.
The example — using a shelf company called Tuscan Mood 1224 — also implicates Kebble in a bizarre alleged case of identity theft involving former CCB agent Barry Bawden.
Bawden was jailed in Zimbabwe for a decade for his role in a car bomb attack on an African National Congress “safe house” in Harare in 1988. He gained an early release in December 1999, after being pardoned by President Robert Mugabe.
Bawden’s attorney, Theuns Potgieter, told the Mail & Guardian his client had no knowledge of Tuscan Mood and that his signature was forged to open bank accounts, register companies and authorise the transfer of funds.
With the help of forensic auditors, Gray is attempting to trace assets that belong to the JCI group, but which appear to have been secretly sold to fund Kebble’s extravagant lifestyle and “protection”.
Police have made no progress in solving Kebble’s murder on September 27 last year, but have reportedly recovered evidence that senior political figures received pay-offs and favours.
As part of retracing Kebble’s share deals, Gray has applied for the provisional liquidation of several companies apparently used to strip out JCI assets.
They include Tuscan Mood, of which Bawden is listed as sole director, and a close corporation, Paradigm Shift, which shared a bank account with Tuscan and was purportedly also represented by Bawden.
The major focus of Gray’s investigation is the disappearance of shares in Randgold Resources Limited worth about R2-billion, formerly held by JCI’s Randgold & Exploration.
In court papers, Gray suggests that, in the two years before Kebble’s death, the holding in Randgold Resources was “dissipated without authority”.
“Paradigm and Tuscan played a pivotal role in procuring such disposal and received a large proportion of the funds generated,” Gray alleged. He links the companies directly to transactions of R35-million between November 2003 and October 2004.
According to the affidavit, the sale of the Randgold Resources shares and the transfer of the proceeds into an Alberton bank account in the name of Tuscan Mood was mandated by a Mr BD Bawden.
Bawden’s attorney said these mandates were not signed by his client, though he said that Bawden’s sister, Patricia Beale, served as company secretary for JCI and many other companies in the group, and would normally have been empowered to authorise such share sales.
A copy of a mandate form, purportedly signed by Bawden, is included in Gray’s court application. But Gray is curiously vague about how Paradigm or Bawden came to be authorised to act on behalf of Randgold & Exploration, or if there was authorisation.
This raises questions, because at the time Gray himself was chief executive of Tlotlisa Securities, or T-Sec, the brokerage that handled these transactions.
Tlotlisa itself was hardly at arm’s length from Kebble. In 2003 it and Gray facilitated an empowerment deal led by Kebble’s business associate, Sello Rasethaba, which saw a consortium, partly funded by JCI, acquire a majority stake in the broking firm.
Gray’s spokesperson, Brian ÂGibson, said Gray was not involved in the share trades and that brokers were not obliged to question properly authorised transactions. He said, even if Gray had been aware of the trades, they would not have aroused suspicion as the JCI group routinely conducted massive trades.
He declined to answer further questions about the investigation, saying Gray would present a detailed report to shareholders, probably towards the end of March.
Gray’s affidavit does not say what became of the R35-million paid out to Tuscan Mood, but a secret insolvency inquiry has reportedly been set up as part of a bid to trace the funds.
The M&G has established that Sars has linked Tuscan Mood directly to Kebble.
In a document filed with the executor of Kebble’s estate in Cape Town, Sars is claiming R186-million in unpaid taxes and penalties against him. As part of justifying its tax assessment, Sars lists “income received from T-Sec and ÂTuscan Mood 1224” as being to Kebble’s benefit.
Sars does not disclose how it links Tuscan and T-Sec to Kebble, but lists astronomical amounts of money fed to him from these two sources — R6,6-million in 2002; R12,5-million in 2003; R130,7-million in 2004; R74,5-million in 2005; and R1,7-million in 2006. This totals R226-million, by far the bulk of Kebble’s assessed taxable income of R267-million for those years.
Some of those trades may have been share options granted to Kebble as part of his remuneration, but the sheer scale of the transactions running through T-Sec, together with Gray’s evidence, Âsuggests a significant proportion was skimmed from JCI assets.
Bawden’s name is also linked to Kebble through another company, Hothouse Investments. Company records show in August 2001 Kebble became a director of Hothouse, whose business is described as relating to “private households, extraterritorial organisations, representatives of foreign governments and other activities not adequately defined”.
In November 2001, Kebble resigned and was purportedly replaced by Bawden.
Potgieter said Hothouse was set up as a possible agricultural enterprise and Bawden had been invited to be a non-Âexecutive director, but the company had never traded.