The mystery of the disappearance of millions of rands invested in manufacturing plants to produce biodiesel has deepened, despite a case in the Pretoria High Court this week.
Bio Diesel Refinery Holdings (DRH), the former marketing company of De Beers Fuel; a group of investors who bought franchises; and a security company applied on Friday for a winding-up order against De Beers Fuel, the company that promised to produce biodiesel from algae.
De Beers successfully defended the action.
Some applicants claimed De Beers Fuel director Frik de Beer and his daughter had ”misappropriated funds”.
They said the promised biodiesel plants never materialised and that they were now entitled to the return of their investment. They claimed De Beers was commercially insolvent and unable to pay its debts.
DRH claimed it was owed money for setting up an office on behalf of De Beers Fuel.
De Beer reacted angrily, saying any suggestions that he and his daughter had misappropriated funds was defamatory. He said his company had a bona fide defence against all of the claims, and could not be held responsible for the actions of outside parties.
He insisted that investors should have taken ”the real fraudsters” — his company’s former attorney, Howard Woolf and Hendy Schoonbee (once the driving force behind the franchise agreements) — to court if they wanted their money back.
De Beer said he had two plants in Naboomspruit worth more than R100-million and that the company was producing 5 000 litres of biodiesel per month.
DRH said this was far from the millions of litres promised, and this was the first time it had ever heard that anything was, in fact, being produced.
Judge Chris Botha said the applicants could not prove that money paid into Woolf’s trust account had ended up in the business account of De Beers Fuel, and could also not rely on the say-so of Woolf, who made numerous conflicting statements.
He said De Beer had clearly inflated the value of the two plants, as he was prepared to sell a plant for R6-million and it was impossible to gauge on what income the company relied.
But, De Beers had shown that the claims of the applicants were disputed on bona fide grounds, and the winding-up application could not succeed. — Sapa