Brett Kebble had already appeared in a well-publicised court case on fraud charges when the Democratic Alliance accepted a R250 000 donation from him.
It was also in February 2004 — the month of Kebble’s donation to the DA — that the Mail & Guardian revealed his dubious role in supporting ventures of the ANC Youth League’s business arm, Lembede.
The DA has criticised the African National Congress’s acceptance of donations from the controversial businessman, murdered in October last year, calling for the money to be returned to the liquidators of Kebble’s estate.
DA MP James Selfe told a media conference this week that the party received from Kebble a total of R250 000 in 2001 and further R250 000 in February 2004. At the time the donations were made, Selfe said, there was no reason to believe that they were in any way “problematic”.
However, it has now emerged that at the time of the last donation the Kebble empire was already under investigation.
Brett’s father Roger was arrested and charged with 38 counts of fraud in November 2002 and contravening the Companies Act and Insider Trading Act and, with his son, spent most of 2003 battling to get the charges dismissed.
In 2003, when the charge sheet was finalised, Brett Kebble was also charged.
The charges related to alleged fraud in a series of deals involving Randfontein Estates gold mine in 1999. The state alleged the Kebbles had rigged Randfontein’s share price in their own favour on the JSE by, among other things, buying shares in the company without informing the interested public.
The charges, involving about R6-million, were dismissed in June last year after the state failed to produce sufficient evidence.
In June this year, Roger Kebble again appeared in court on five new charges of fraud and tax evasion. At a further appearance in the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court this week, his trial was postponed to March 19 next year.
Selfe said the DA was not aware of any scandal surrounding the Kebbles when it accepted the last donation. “In any event we operate on the principle that a person is innocent until found guilty,” he said.
He added: “We do not have the time to put donors through a ‘donor check’ and if we believe the individual donation is genuine, we do not have a problem,” he said. “If we started doing background checks on every donor it would be a full-time job, for which we certainly do not have the time.”
Selfe argued that when the ANC accepted money from Kebble, his shady dealings were well known. “Also, a lot of the money went to private individuals in the party,” he said
Asked how the party distinguished between “clean” and “dirty” money donated to it, Selfe said: “How would the M&G do that? We accepted donations from a gambling facility, and with people being addicted to gambling you can argue that donation was dirty money.”
Selfe said that if it was proved in future that the donations involved corrupt money, the DA would return them immediately.