Details emerging from the German corruption probe into defence and steel conglomerate ThyssenKrupp have thrown dramatic new light on two men named in the very first allegations concerning the South African arms deal.
One is Shamin ”Chippy” Shaik, former chief of acquisitions for the Defence Department, who came under suspicion almost from the start because of his brother Schabir’s involvement in the arms deal.
The other is Tony Georgiadis, who has remained largely in the shadows despite being mentioned in the infamous ”De Lille dossier”, a memorandum drawn up by concerned African National Congress (ANC) intelligence operatives and released through Patricia de Lille in September 1999.
Shaik was at the centre of special defence procurement and reported directly to former defence minister Joe Modise, whose death in 2001 stifled a Scorpions probe into Modise’s own controversial role in the arms deal.
Georgiades, a Greek shipping tycoon and alleged key sanctions-buster under apartheid, reportedly had the ear of President Thabo Mbeki while acting as a lobbyist for Thyssen, lead partner in the German frigate consortium (GFC), and Ferrostaal, which led the German submarine consortium.
Two sources in touch with the German investigators told the Mail & Guardian that Georgiadis is a focus of the investigation of at least $22-million in commission payments made on the warship deal.
Georgiadis was travelling this week and could not be contacted.
The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Monday that, in raids on Thyssen and related companies last year, the Dusseldorf prosecutor’s office obtained internal company memos allegedly referring to a meeting between executives of the GFC and Chippy Shaik in July 1998.
Shaik allegedly demanded payment of $3-million to ensure the success of the German bid. He supposedly proposed a middleman: accountant Ian Pierce, a friend from his student days at the University of Durban-Westville.
This week, Pierce refused to take media calls. Mo Shaik, speaking for his brother, dismissed the claims against Chippy.
Der Spiegel wrote that later in 1998 a lobby agreement for $3-million was signed with Merian Limited, in London, with Pierce acting as Merian’s representative. The magazine said the first payments for the warships were made to the GFC in April 2000 and Merian received $3-million from the Germans in the same month.
Payments
The M&G has traced five payments from Merian to a South African bank account held by Pierce.
The payments, roughly monthly, began in August 2000 and appear to correspond to interest payments that might be received on such a sum. The five payments extend until March 2001 — when the arms deal probe was already hotting up — and total about R470Â 000. These were probably only interest payments.
Der Spiegel did not name the GFC executives who allegedly met Shaik, but the key figure is understood to be Christoff Hoenings, then manager of Thyssen subsidiary Thyssen Rheinstahl.
Hoenings revealed in 1995, during earlier bidding for the corvette contract, that Mbeki intervened to restore the German bid after Armscor had announced a shortlist that included only Spain’s Bazan and Britain’s Yarrow shipyards.
Hoenings said Mbeki had, on a state visit to Germany, personally told him ”the race is still open to all contenders”.
A well-placed intelligence source identified Hoenings as one of the Thyssen executives close to Georgiadis.
Georgiadis keeps a low profile: his only media exposure was when his wife, Elita, left him for former president FW de Klerk. But the De Lille dossier identified Georgiadis as a lobbyist for the German arms companies.
The 1999 memo states: ”Thyssen is the preferred bidder for the corvettes — Ferrostaal is the preferred bidder for the submarines. Both companies is [sic] supported by Tony Georgiades who is facilitating the success of their bid. FW de Klerk is married to Elita who was married to Tony Georgiades. We know that Tony was bankrolling the Nationalist Party and its leaders.”
Several sources said Georgiades was close to Mbeki. Last year, the aborted corruption trial of former deputy president Jacob Zuma confirmed his relationship with former justice minister Penuell Maduna and former Scorpions boss Bulelani Ngcuka.
Der Spiegel revealed that the German authorities were looking at payments made to several other people, firms and foundations linked to the South African deal, including a Monrovia-registered company that had received a total of $22-million by October 2001.
The M&G understands that it has been identified as Mallar Incorporated, an offshore company registered in 1978 with the Liberian International Shipping and Company Register.
The register is extremely opaque, providing neither the names of directors and shareholders, nor contact addresses for the underlying entity. However, two sources in touch with German investigators confirm that the investigators believe Georgiadis is behind Mallar.
Answering questions about Merian, Mallar and Georgiadis, a spokesperson for ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems said: ”At this stage we have nothing further to say.”
Questions to the Presidency about Mbeki’s relationship with Georgiadis were unanswered at the time of going to press.
Tony Georgiadis: ‘A kingmaker’
”At home, he has photographs of every damn president in the world — He was a political player,” is how a former senior official in South Africa remembers Georgiadis.
Georgiadis’s home, the historic Stud House in the grounds of Hampton Court palace outside London, has hosted more than pictures. While president, De Klerk stayed there, and in his autobiography, De Klerk called Georgiadis a ”good friend” — but that was before the affair.
De Klerk admitted in 1998 to ”having fallen in love” with Elita, whom he later married. The affair was said to have begun in 1994 during one of a number of Mediterranean holidays aboard Georgiadis’s yacht.
According to Beeld, ”a connection developed with the NP [National Party] during the Eighties through oil matters — Mr Georgiades [sic] was a campaigner against sanctions abroad and was regarded as a ‘friend of South Africa’.”
Georgiadis did more than campaign. Alandis, headed by him and his brother, Alexander, was one of the main shippers of crude oil to apartheid South Africa, breaching international sanctions.
The Shipping Research Bureau, which monitored compliance with the embargo, said in 1995: ”In 1989 rumours that a company named Alandis (London) Ltd was the main shipper of oil to South Africa reached the Shipping Research Bureau.
”Only much later, hard evidence surfaced which showed that the rumours had been rather close to the truth. A long list of shipments — as many as 43 in the short period from March 1988 until October 1989, plus a few in the previous years — could be linked to Alandis.”
The M&G understands that apart from organising third-party shipments, Alandis also managed the Pacificos, a crude tanker then owned by the Strategic Fuel Fund Association (SFF), set up by the apartheid government to beat the embargo.
African roots
The Georgiadis brothers, though Greek citizens based in England, have African roots. Their mother, Clio Colocotronis, married their father, Vassos Georgiadis, when she was a teenager and he was two decades her senior. She was the daughter of a banker living in Egypt; he an East African tobacco baron. Alexander and Antony were born in Kampala.
”A kingmaker”, is how one source in the oil industry describes Antony Georgiades. ”He’s extremely influential. He doesn’t do it for the money only — a lot of it is for the prestige.”
In 1994, when De Klerk started romancing his wife and the ANC replaced the NP as ruling party, Georgiadis became as close to members of the new elite as he had been to their predecessors.
The names most often mentioned as Georgiadis’s new local connections include Mbeki, Maduna (former minister of minerals and energy and of justice), his wife, Nompumelelo Maduna (in the oil trade herself), Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka (who succeeded Maduna at minerals and energy), and her husband, Bulelani Ngcuka, the former prosecutions head.
Deals
A source close to Imvume, the subject of the Oilgate scandal, has claimed that when its principal, Sandi Majali, first wanted to enter the Iraqi oil trade, he was bankrolled by Georgiadis. He has also been drawn into the succession battle.
Affidavits, filed last year in Zuma’s successful application to have his prosecution for corruption struck from the roll, suggest that Georgiadis attempted to broker a deal that would let French arms company Thales off the hook in return for giving evidence against Zuma.
Both Maduna and Ngcuka’s affidavits describe being contacted by someone ”purporting to be an intermediary” for Thales while they were on official business in London in 2003. The intermediary, whom they do not name, told them Thales was willing to cooperate. At the time, Maduna was still justice minister and Ngcuka the prosecutions head.
In a replying affidavit, Thales official Pierre Moynot reveals Georgiadis as the intermediary, although he denies the initiative was from Thales.
Moynot states that Thales International CEO Jean-Paul Perrier was contacted by Georgiadis, who asked to meet in Paris. ”At the meeting Georgiades [sic] introduced himself as a good friend of Maduna and Ngcuka and wanted to know whether Perrier was prepared to meet with Ngcuka in connection with the investigations that were being conducted in South Africa.
”When Perrier expressed misgivings about Georgiades’s claim concerning his friendship with Ngcuka and Maduna, he called Ngcuka on his mobile phone and passed it to Perrier to talk. Ngcuka confirmed his friendship with Georgiades.”
Georgiadis was not available for comment.