The African National Congress Youth League and Brett Kebble’s other political clients must face facts: the vast scale of the murdered businessman’s crimes has become inescapable.
What has also become clear is that Kebble could not have looted and manipulated the companies he controlled — the listed JCI and Randgold & Exploration (R&E) and the unlisted Tuscan Mood 124 and Paradigm Shift CC — without the active or unknowing participation of others.
They include his father, Roger, JCI finance director Hennie Buitendag — central to Kebble’s schemes, JCI director John Stratton and Kebble’s other co-directors on the JCI and R&E boards.
His companies’ auditors, Charles Orbach, surely also has questions to answer.
If they knew of Kebble’s schemes and failed to alert shareholders, they would seem to share his guilt. If they were unwitting participants, they would seem to have lapsed in their fiduciary duties. They collected fees without demur and failed to uncover or openly express concern about the state of Kebble’s companies.
Roger Kebble has decamped to London after South Africa’s receiver of revenue attached assets estimated at R62-million. Sources say a Johannesburg lady friend has decorated a flat for him in the British capital. If that is correct, one is justified in asking how he moved the necessary cash offshore and whether Kebble stashed money overseas.
The taxman is claiming unpaid taxes and penalties of R183-million or more against Kebble’s estate, which would swallow the R40-million declared estate he willed in its entirety to his widow, Ingrid.
This from the great South African “patriot” who claimed to be doing all in his power to help black empowerment.
Kebble sought to burnish his public image by channelling about R30-million through journalist David Gleason when Gleason acquired nominal ownership of Finance Week. That venture folded, but Gleason continued to deliver favourable press coverage or attacks on those with whom Kebble had commercial disputes.
Others on his payroll, or on the payrolls of the companies he plundered, included former judge Willem Heath, who was brought in to add a veneer of respectability.
Kebble’s modus operandi was the same as that of many fraudsters — he quietly transferred and sold shares in London-listed Randgold & Resources (R&R) to pay pressing creditors, but concealed those transfers so as to fool creditors and shareholders of JCI and R&E into believing their claims against the public companies were backed by R&R shares worth R1,2-billion.
And he quietly sold a significant part of JCI’s shareholding in gold company Western Areas for another few hundred million rands. Then there were shares, worth hundreds of millions, in uranium hopeful Afrikander Lease, in Harmony and Anglo Platinum, which have disappeared without trace.
The precise mechanisms are not necessarily important. The facts were that Kebble used the fraudulently converted funds to buy political influence and to fund what he believed to be influential individuals and organisations with access reaching as far as Jacob Zuma’s deputy presidency. And he also used them to squirrel funds overseas, out of sight of the South African authorities.
Also in question is the role of finance group SociÃ