Murdered mining magnate Brett Kebble’s Randgold & Exploration was solvent the company said in a statement on Sunday.
”[Chief executive officer Peter Gray] said that a financial report, due to be released on Friday would confirm this,” according to company spokesperson Brian Gibson.
He was responding to a Sunday Times article which reported that the company’s finances were so damaged it could not be turned around and was ”fatally wounded”.
The article quoted a forensic report by auditors Umbono.
John Louw, CEO of Umbono, said in a statement he was disturbed that the confidential preliminary forensic reports provided to the company had been leaked.
”Our comments about the state of the company related to the sheer scale of the frauds and the impact on the company’s reputation, not to its solvency”, said Louw.
The report quoted Gibson as saying: ”The company is undoubtedly insolvent … ”. Gibson said he had told the paper twice that Randgold was in fact solvent.
Randgold CEO Gray said that corrective action by the directors, including the identification of claims and recoverable assets amounting to almost R1-billion, had strengthened the company’s balance sheet. Some of these recoveries had already taken place.
Gibson said: ”The company will indeed seek to recover any money that had been misappropriated or was owed to it”.
Forensic investigators were urging Randgold to claim back about R95- million of shareholder’s money, the Sunday Times reported.
Brett Kebble was claimed to have channelled this figure out of the company and used it to support the ANC and leading members of the ruling party, the paper said.
Umbono’s forensic reports were drawn up between October 2005 and January this year. – Sapa