Читать книгу VBS - Dewald van Rensburg - Страница 13

VBS started its journey out of obscurity on the back of the fuel facility money from the PIC and the PIC would be its go-to throughout the drama that ensued. Without the PIC, there would have been no VBS.

Nothing about the story is quite as flagrant as the apparent corruption of PIC men Paul Magula and Ernest Nesane. They were both stars in the organisation holding key positions of trust: head of risk and head of legal respectively. They were deployed to the VBS board precisely because they had ‘roots in Venda’.1 There is no greater indictment of the PIC than having these two men hear, see and do nothing in the midst of a major corporate fraud.

While Magula and Nesane were the two most directly implicated, there is every indication that other staff at the PIC may have been compromised for being VBS beneficiaries. The forensic investigation later commissioned by the PIC found that at least three other PIC officials who may have worked on deals with VBS had VBS loans. The final forensic report referred to these officials by their surnames only: Moloto, Netshikweta and Buthelezi. According to the report, they could not be named due to the PIC’s objection that it might be impermissible in terms of the Protection of Personal Information Act.2

Another clue that more PIC personnel may have been involved came from VBS’s treasurer, Phophi Mukhodobwane. After the fall of VBS, he claimed that he ‘was reluctant to give them the names of the people from PIC’ out of concerns for his safety.3

There is also the fact that the PIC’s CEO at the time, Dan Matjila, received a loan. There is no concrete evidence that this constituted a bribe, apart from the fact that he failed to disclose a R2.4 million mortgage from VBS in March 2017. ‘Dr Matjila was granted a loan in VBS and, in his capacity as CEO … he had a duty to disclose that he received such a loan. In the absence of documentation from VBS, we are unable to conclude whether such a loan constitutes a gratification as envisaged in PRECCA [the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act],’ the PIC’s forensic investigators concluded.4

Matjila’s case, however, is far more controversial. When Mukhodobwane testified before the SARB’s investigators, he described an incident in which he personally delivered R5 million in cash, supposedly meant for ‘Dr Dan’, to Matodzi.5 According to Mukhodobwane, he was instructed to withdraw the money from VBS’s Makhado (Louis Trichardt) branch and then use Vele Investments’ helicopter to fly to Lanseria airport in Gauteng. Matodzi allegedly met him there to collect the money.

Bank records do show a R5 million cash withdrawal from the branch in Makhado that day, but the destination of that money cannot be proved. There was apparently a lot of whispering in the corridors at VBS after the teller who counted out the cash grumbled about the experience. This was in the same week that Matjila got his VBS mortgage.

But there is another compelling, and shocking, reason to believe the R5 million had something to do with one or more of the PIC men.

The money was withdrawn on 18 April 2017. The upset teller apparently called Madambi Muvhulawa, thinking the retired VBS veteran might be able to take up the issue with the bosses. Muvhulawa said he unknowingly passed the information on to someone more or less guaranteed to do nothing about it. ‘A teller called me because it is unusual to see cash like that,’ he told me. ‘I phoned Nesane and he said he is going to follow up to see what to do with it. I wanted someone I can trust. He said, “Leave it to me.”’6

For his part, Matjila has been especially vocal in denying the VBS bribe claim. He issued an open letter through the PIC’s media department on 25 October 2018 extolling his own successes as CEO and defending himself against the various allegations he faced at that point. ‘As for my name being linked to the debacle that is VBS, this has to be the lowest of the low in allegations,’ he declared. ‘The mere suggestion that I would accept a bribe – R5 million in cash is abhorrent to me.’7

Whatever other employees of the PIC did or knew, it was Nesane and Magula who were at the front line of doing nothing to stop what was happening at VBS. Nesane had been put onto the bank’s board in 2013. Magula followed in 2015, at the same time as Matodzi.

Matodzi’s old friend and estranged partner, Maanda Phalanndwa, told me that, as early as 2013, Matodzi had some kind of plan to co-opt Nesane by giving him secret shares in Dyambeu as soon as it invested in VBS.8 Subsequent events lend a lot of credence to this claim.

Whether or not there was a plan to cut Nesane in with a secret shareholding, the chain of events that followed was a lot less sophisticated. And not even that well hidden. At the end of 2015, Nesane got a mortgage and car loan totalling R2 million from VBS. This occurred when the bank was contemplating its first rights issue and the plan for a PIC-funded fuel venture was starting to take shape.

When VBS collapsed and journalists started poking around the bank statements of Vele Petroport and Vele Investments, it didn’t take long to uncover further questionable transactions.9

On 25 August 2016, Petroport made a rapid succession of seven payments totalling R1.25 million from its VBS account. This was the ‘pot’ of fees Ramavhunga claimed Petroport had at hand on a monthly basis. Along with Matodzi, Madzonga, Ramavhunga and Makhavhu, two mysterious companies – Investar Connect Holdings and Parallel Property – each got R150 000. A few days later, Investar received another R750 000.

A month later, the same beneficiaries, excluding Investar, were paid the same amounts. This time, however, there was a new company in the mix called Hekima Capital, seemingly in the place of Investar. It also got R150 000. The group as a whole received similar monthly payouts until December 2016, when the Petroport plan collapsed.

That could have been the end of it, but on 20 December 2016 Vele Investments made additional payments to the same beneficiaries. Parallel got R1 million, but instead of Hekima or Investar, the other recipient of a R1 million windfall was ‘Magula P’. You don’t get much more on-the-nose than that. Someone had slipped up.

When the monthly payments from the Petroport ‘pot’ ceased, Vele Investments seemingly stepped in and continued to pay out varying amounts in the same way. ‘Magula P’ is an obvious reference to Paul Magula, but what were Parallel, Hekima and Investar?

A simple search of company records brought up two Parallel companies: Parallel Capital and Parallel Property Holdings. Over the course of its existence, Parallel Capital was registered at two addresses tied to Ernest Nesane – addresses at which he had either lived or run other businesses. Parallel Property Holdings used the same address as Parallel Capital. Records from the deeds office showed that Parallel Property had a whole bunch of mortgages from VBS. So, there were two Parallel companies – both at an address linked to Nesane and one loaded to the hilt with VBS debt.

All of this was relatively easy to discover based on Vele’s bank statements alone. Later, forensic investigators tallied up Nesane’s illicit payments and unpaid debts to R16.6 million. Half seem like bribes through Parallel Property and the other half mortgages and a vehicle loan, which were never declared to the PIC when Nesane was weighing in on investment decisions about VBS. Among Nesane’s acquisitions were a R4 million farm in Limpopo in June 2016 and another R2.25 million property in Polokwane around the same time. Both were bonded to VBS. He bought a handful of other properties using cash he had lying around in his account.

Another search of company records showed that Investar and Hekima were both registered at an address owned by Magula. He had even been a director of Hekima in the past. He was very sloppy. His payments and loans from VBS came to R14.8 million over less than two years.

The scale of these payments has to be measured against what Magula and Nesane were earning at the PIC. Magula’s salary was R200 000 per month and Nesane’s was under R170 000 per month.10 The Petroport/Vele payments easily tripled their income. It is not difficult to surmise where their loyalties probably lay.

In return for this money, they had a very simple job: do nothing. Don’t raise anything you see at VBS with your employer, the PIC, and let VBS’s executives do as they please. After VBS collapsed, Nesane told SARB investigators that he would, for instance, turn a blind eye to financial statements he knew were false and stand back from controversial appointments to key jobs even though he served on the bank’s human resources committee. Magula, sitting on the VBS credit committee, should have had an eye on all major loans and, for instance, the wildly inappropriate use of the R350 million PIC fuel facility.

Apart from their roles in the fuel facility, Magula and Nesane also helped convince the PIC to invest new capital in VBS in successive rights issues, leaving the PIC with a total loss of R482.7 million when VBS crashed.

Magula was fired shortly afterwards and Nesane took the initiative to resign straight after giving evidence to the SARB. They would later face criminal charges alongside VBS executives. Whatever the outcome, the two are unlikely to ever find work again. They have both been struck off the list of registered financial service providers and are now listed as debarred because they do not ‘comply with personal character qualities of honesty and integrity’.11 They were also both declared delinquent directors after a court application brought by the PIC, meaning they cannot be the directors of any company, not so much as a family restaurant, for seven years.

When the payments to Nesane and Magula were put to Ramavhunga by Motau’s investigators, he said he had no idea who Parallel, Hekima or Investar were. ‘I was gobsmacked,’ he later said in an affidavit. ‘I simply could not accept that amounts had been paid through the same banking account to Magula and Nesane for “petrol money”.’ He expressed ‘horror and shock’ about many things that were put to him.12

Whatever favours VBS dished out directly to PIC officials, the story goes much deeper – into what looks like a wholesale patronage machine operating in the background of several PIC deals. When Magula and Nesane got their VBS millions through front companies, those front companies had what seem to be real stand-in directors.

Hekima Capital had as its sole director a man named Lot Magosha. Magosha was well remunerated. According to banks records, Magula’s two front companies paid him R1.35 million,13 almost 10 per cent of the benefits Magula received. These payments were made directly into Magosha’s personal Investec bank account. When I first contacted Magosha in 2018, he told me he had bought Hekima from Magula as an ‘empty’ shelf company and that the payments it received were all loans.14

The payments to Magosha, however, came from both Hekima and Investar, and sometimes had obscure references in the bank records. Among others there was a cryptic ‘loan for eggs’ and ‘nandoni land’. Nandoni is a place outside Thohoyandou in Limpopo known for its scenic dam. Other payments from Investar were referenced with ‘shareholder loan’. It is conceivable that Magosha was also a shareholder in Investar.

Another obscure entity that received money from Investar was HillCity, which listed Magosha as its sole director, but like Hekima previously belonged to Magula. Both Hekima and HillCity had Magula resign as a director in late 2016 to have Magosha take the reins instead. HillCity got a small ‘INTCO LOAN’ (inter-company loan) of R20 000, according to bank records – reinforcing the idea that Magosha was a shareholder in Investar and that his affairs were entangled with Magula’s.

Up to this point it just looked like Magula was hiding behind Magosha, but the reality was more complicated and a lot more damning. Blackgold Capital, which listed Magosha and businessman Lawrence Mulaudzi as directors, also received money. Mulaudzi had been a serial beneficiary of huge PIC-funded deals going back to 2015 – the year Magula became head of risk at the PIC. Investar also paid R200 000 in VBS money to an FNB account simply marked ‘Lawrence’. Furthermore, Susan Comrie from the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism found that Investar had shares in two other major deals funded by the PIC and involving Mulaudzi.15

What emerged was that Magula, as head of risk, was apparently receiving kickbacks in cash and shares from other PIC deals beyond VBS, and that these deals seemed to always involve Magosha and Mulaudzi. The alleged kickbacks started shortly after Magula rose to his position as head of risk in 2015.

Mulaudzi hit back at reports. ‘Since 2016 after the conclusion of our transactions with PIC [we were] subjected to various offensive, unfounded allegations that intended to create a narrative that we as a company did not act ethically and properly in our dealings with the PIC,’ he told amaBhungane.16

Something similar was happening with Nesane’s Parallel Property Holdings and Parallel Capital, but with a less obvious connection to further questionable dealings. Nesane’s suspected stand-in as director of Parallel Capital was Lufuno Godfrey Mudau, a man with no obvious link to VBS or Vele, but chairperson of a company from Limpopo called Rengani Group.

Another Nesane company sharing the address of both Parallel companies, Dzata Group, listed Emmanuel Masala Ramadi as its director. Ramadi was also a director of Rengani Group, alongside Mudau. Nesane paid on R1.35 million to Rengani Group, the same amount Magula paid to Lot Magosha. Rengani coincidentally also got money from Magula: R500 000. I was not able to figure out what Rengani did to earn this money. When I tried to question Mudau about it back in 2018, he said he couldn’t talk because he was driving and then turned off his phone. A year later, that was seemingly still his approach to journalists when asked about Rengani.17

Simply lending your name to a company for fronting purposes paid way less than what Rengani and Magosha got. A good example is Parallel Property’s director, Rudzani Nndwammbi, who got paid fairly pitiful amounts of R5 000 per month, totalling R72 600 over almost two years. He too is not talking about it.18

Despite the mountain of evidence against him, Magula insisted that he was innocent and the victim of a witch-hunt at the PIC after he had raised uncomfortable questions that Matjila did not approve of. In 2019, he gave a passionate speech to the Mpati Commission of Inquiry: ‘I want to use this opportunity to clear my name and on the issues that were reported in the media as a former board member of VBS Mutual Bank representing PIC. I take responsibility that what happened at the bank was wrong. But also there is no way I could have known what was happening beyond the misrepresentation made to the board through audit reports that were presented to me as a board member and also as an Executive Head of Risk within the PIC … I have never participated in any illegal and fraudulent activities during my tenure as a VBS board member. Some of the things like fictitious deposits, fraudulent withdrawals, bribes, etc. that are said to have happened at VBS I got to know about when I went before the Prudential Authority’s forensic investigators. I’m willing and ready to subject myself and cooperate with the law enforcements agencies.’19

I met Magula once and the overwhelming impression I got was nervousness. Long before anyone knew what had happened at VBS, he was fighting for his career at the PIC after dramatically falling out of favour with Matjila.

On 7 February 2018, the PIC told Magula that he was being demoted to head of regulatory compliance because the ‘PIC has become very concerned about the overall management of the Risk function’.20 This was before anyone had an inkling that VBS was going to collapse. A month later, the week before VBS imploded, Magula was facing a disciplinary hearing. On 18 April, he was summarily fired. VBS fell during his disciplinary process, but it was not the original reason for it.

‘I would like to categorically and emphatically state that the PIC took issue with me and on VBS Mutual Bank after I already had issues with the CEO and the CFO and the Executive Head of HR of the PIC,’ Magula told the Mpati Commission. ‘I was this young man who had ambition to … like any young man you like to arise from the bottom to the top and you probably, in hindsight, you realise that, no, hey, people do have some ulterior motives and you become usable … I was a usable boy, truly, if I would put it that way, and the more you grow, you grow to the role, you then realise, you know, there are things that you wouldn’t have loved to happen and when you have that you become a stumbling block to the powers that be and I probably, as I grew, I started questioning what needs to be questioned and the more you question that the more you become an easy victim to get out, you become like a person who has seen the light and then you are disturbing what you probably have been employed for and hence I was a victim of the circumstances that I’d gone through.’21

This was his story exactly a year after VBS collapsed.

Magula was not wrong that Matjila wanted to get rid of him. When he testified at the same commission, Matjila laid into his former head of risk: ‘People like Magula … all of a sudden there was a lack of cooperation. Remember, this is a person that I personally thought they could run Risk. And indeed, in the beginning, I saw potential. They were quite obedient. Quite enthusiastic. Quite willing to learn. Quite willing to be guided. We put them on the board of VBS, as we all know … We know we may not have powers to instruct VBS how to go about conducting their business, but at least, as a bigger shareholder, we need to be consulted and at least have a view on how some of these matters of reputations can be managed … But anyway. What I saw is, is different people now in Magula. Very disobedient.’22

The arbitrator in Magula’s disciplinary hearing at the PIC found that he ‘[f]ailed to take care of his duties as the Executive Head: Risk in relation to his failure to disclose the financial sustainability of VBS Bank and to advise of a material change to risk.’23

Matjila said that Magula’s performance had been sub-standard from as far back as May 2017. One could speculate that he might have taken his eye off the ball at that point because his second salary from VBS was already far more important to him than his PIC pay. ‘Matjila [is] of the view that Magula is susceptible to influence,’ the Nexus report noted.24

As for Nesane, at least some of his subordinates thought the world of him. The PIC’s legal advisor, Boitumelo Leroke, described Nesane as a true professional respected by practically everyone: ‘I respected Mr Nesane, I mean I relied on his experience so he was at the PIC for a very long time when I got there so I really, he really depicted a picture of a respectable man, a professional, an individual who knew his work … So you wouldn’t even have thought he’d do something, like he’d do anything untoward, he was even respected throughout the company. He was respected throughout in the field so it was just not at the PIC only, like outside PIC he was respected.’25

The apparent bribery of Nesane and Magula was part of a far more extensive patronage machine around VBS. It was only one part of the process of knocking down the checks and balances that should have made the whole thing impossible. But it was an important one.