Tax evasion charges against Roger Kebble — father and business partner of slain mining magnate Brett Kebble — appear to be part of broader moves to shut down the remnants of the Kebble empire.
Market rumours suggested Kebble Snr had been attempting to raise finance to make a bid to re-take JCI, the main vehicle for his son’s financial finagling, currently being untangled by JCI’s caretaker directors.
Roger Kebble’s appearance in the Johannesburg regional court on seven counts of fraud relating to unpaid taxes totalling R7,2-million will make any such bid nigh impossible.
And the action by the South African Revenue Service (Sars) comes on top of attempts to stymie another Kebble project that might have propped up Kebble Snr’s dwindling asset base, namely, the Simmer & Jack deal.
Simmers is a gold mining company in which Roger Kebble is a shareholder and which was set to benefit both from the resurgence of gold shares and from new, empowerment-based mining rights.
However, Simmers’s plans have recently been torpedoed by its own empowerment shareholder — a company called Vulisango.
In both cases old allies appear to have deserted the sinking Kebble ship, most notably former African National Congress intelligence operative Ronnie Watson.
Watson, whose Eastern Cape family became something of an anti-apartheid- icon for refusing to take part in segregated sport, was a long-time associate of Roger Kebble during his tenure at another mining company, Durban Roodepoort Deep (DRD).
Some of the tax evasion charges against Kebble relate to the so-called Skilled Labour Brokers (SLB) matter, in which Watson was intimately involved.
Under Roger Kebble, SLB was contracted to provide security services relating to labour issues. These were, in fact, provided by a close corporation called Global Economic Research, of which Watson was the sole member.
Watson would bill SLB, a close corporation whose sole member was Roger Kebble, which would then bill DRD a much higher amount.
The state attempted to press charges of fraud against Kebble relating to this scheme in November 2002. At that stage Watson was firmly in the Kebble camp, expressing outrage at a police raid on his home to seize documents relating to SLB.
He also backed a successful court challenge to the raid, which, together with defections of key witnesses from DRD to the Kebble camp, saw the case finally collapse last year.
Among the reasons for that collapse was a document that came to light purporting to suggest that monies retained by Kebble were repayments of a loan to Watson.
Now Sars has simply bypassed this issue and charged Kebble with failing to declare the income flowing through SLB. And Watson, too, appears to have shifted sides. In the Simmers structure, Watson is part of what is called the ”management pool” of Simmers shareholders which includes Kebble and which is locked in a battle with Vulisango.
The dispute is mainly over the fact that Vulisango has launched a separate competing bid for the same mining rights Simmers is asking the Department of Minerals and Energy to approve. The department, in turn, has displayed a rather transparent preference for Vulisango.
Now media reports claim Watson has abandoned his own management voting pool and is backing the other side: Vulisango.
That’s perhaps not so surprising.
Watson’s brother, Valence, is a Vulisango director. So is Watson’s former ANC comrade, Gibson Njenje, until recently the head of operations for the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and among Brett Kebble’s most influential business partners.
Njenje was one of those suspended by Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils over the NIA’s botched surveillance of businessman Saki Macozoma.
Unlike his boss, Billy Masetlha, Njenje reached a quiet and amicable settlement with Kasrils. Like Njenje, Watson appears to have seen the writing on the wall.