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Agent 5332

Before I describe some of the newcomers to the industry, who became locked in battle with the established players, I need to introduce a person whose name will crop up repeatedly in these pages. She is Belinda Walter, whom I first met on 4 September 2013. It was a fateful day for me in view of what would later transpire. I had no inkling of her existence at this time, other than a prior email exchange following a minor complaint she had addressed to then acting commissioner of SARS, Ivan Pillay, in which she described herself as the chairperson of the new Fair-Trade Independent Tobacco Association (FITA). Pillay asked me to meet with her and explain our response.

At this point in time I was a group executive in charge of tax and customs enforcement investigations, managing five investigative units at SARS and overseeing just over 85 big projects that were focused on what we called the illicit economy. Contrary to a finding by a subsequent internal panel tasked by SARS to investigate the relationship between Walter and me, I was in fact not alone when we met but accompanied by another SARS manager.

When we first met, Walter presented herself as an attorney who had just recently opened her own law practice in Pretoria, and who specialised in matrimonial disputes, trademarks and patents.22 She claimed that her role as FITA chairperson was somewhat of a sideline or pastime. I believed her. In 2015, however, she would make the startling claim under oath that she had initiated FITA in conjunction with the State Security Agency (SSA). ‘FITA was intended to be a conduit for SSA and law enforcement agencies to understand the tobacco industry and the smaller, local tobacco manufacturers and whether any impropriety was being conducted.’ If this story is to be believed, there is no doubt that there could have been no legal authority for the creation of FITA as a spying mechanism for the state. Again, if it is true, the members of FITA must have been completely unaware that they were being spied upon by their very chairperson.

Soon after our first meeting in September, Walter was assaulted at her offices by an unknown woman. Apparently, she received a call to come down to the lobby of the building to meet someone who wanted to talk to her. She had no reason to suspect anything and duly went down to meet the person. She apparently came across a man and a woman, neither of whom said much of any relevance, but then the woman suddenly punched her in the face and the two ran away. Walter reported the issue to the police and a few other people she knew. I came to learn of this incident by chance when another attorney sent me a CCTV photo obtained from the lobby which showed the face of one of the people involved and asked me if I perhaps recognised the person. This attorney then told me what had happened, and I was rather shocked at the event and offered to assist if I could.

Almost two months went by. On 22 October 2013, Walter texted me one evening and we had a friendly exchange of words. This culminated in her asking me out on a date. I had a social engagement that coming Friday evening with friends and I suggested to Walter that she join us. It was a jolly evening. From this day Walter and I began dating. It wasn’t an ‘affair’, as it was later labelled.

That same weekend, Walter and I went to a cheese factory outside Pretoria, near the Hartbeespoort dam, a place called Van Gaalen where they offer daily picnic baskets and an outside setting near a river. We were having our picnic when she became rather serious and said she needed to discuss something with me. I had no idea what was coming. We walked down to the river, and as we were standing there, she made a startling confession to me. She told me she was a spy, codenamed 5332, for the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, and that a few of the officials on the team had it in for me for some or other reason. She identified Chris Burger as her ‘handler’ and told me that, at our first meeting almost two months previously, she had carried a concealed recording device to capture our conversation. This was on the instructions of Burger, who believed I was corrupt. She made light of this by saying that Burger was rather disappointed with the recording because it didn’t implicate me. She also told me that before Burger became her ‘handler’, she worked closely with his predecessor, Ferdi Fryer, and another SSA operative known to me to have been involved in the tobacco industry, Graham Minnaar.

At first taken aback, I appreciated what I believed to be her honesty and thought that she was taking me into her confidence. She first proposed that I ‘play along’ and pretend that I did not know what she’d told me. She would in turn give ‘reports’ to Burger, and in doing so prove over time to him that I wasn’t corrupt as he believed. I had no appetite for such games and said so to her. I told her in no uncertain terms that if she did not tell Burger what she had disclosed to me, then I would. She told me she had been finding the role of spy increasingly difficult in recent times, partly because of things she attributed to Burger, which I won’t elaborate upon here, except to say they weren’t very complimentary. She said she had in fact intended to end her role as a spy in any event and asked me to allow her to do so on her own in discussions with Burger that following week. True to her word, or so I believed, she texted me days later, saying that she and Burger had parted ways. As far as I was concerned, that ended the matter. One side-effect of this was that I now viewed her in a different way. I saw her as one of ‘us’, civil servants who were trying to curb the scourge of crime in the country. In doing this, she had instantaneously won my trust. I would come to regret this later.

The very next day, a Sunday, we were having lunch at a restaurant called Papa’s in Hatfield in Pretoria. Walter dropped another surprise on me. She told me she was the attorney for Carnilinx, the independent tobacco company. Not to worry, she said, she had already informed them, through their director, Adriano Mazzotti, that she was seeing me socially. According to her, he had no issue with this and wished her well. I confirmed with Mazzotti years later that this was indeed true.

I had an issue with this. Technically, nothing in law or in any SARS rules precluded me from dating a lawyer who represented taxpayers in dispute with SARS. All that I had to ensure was that I did not directly participate in any decisions or matters which would affect the client. Quite a few people at SARS are married to or date lawyers, advocates, accountants and auditors who work at firms that often engage in disputes with SARS. It is an inevitability of life. But I felt uncomfortable. I tried, in the best way that I could, to explain to Walter that if this was the case, unfortunately we would not be able to see each other socially again. ‘No, no’, she said, ‘you misunderstand me.’ She then went on to set out what she meant. She said she had felt terribly uncomfortable about being the lawyer for Carnilinx, when in fact she was actually spying on them for the Illicit Tobacco Task Team and getting paid both ways. It was a moral dilemma for her, even though she assured me it was all legal and above board, but she welcomed the opportunity to end things with Carnilinx just as she was going to end her role as spy with Burger too. I left this decision entirely up to her.

Barely two weeks or so into our dating – I was seeing her only on weekends and not during the week on account of my long working hours – I became a bit annoyed with her dilly-dallying in respect of her resignation from Carnilinx. I again reminded her that it was her decision and that I trusted her judgement, but that the indecision couldn’t go on any longer. On 16 November 2013, she sent an email to Carnilinx and SARS, and to me, in which she announced her resignation as attorney for Carnilinx.

As an aside, let me say that the SARS panel that was instituted in 2014 to investigate the relationship erred in its findings on this aspect too, as Walter would point out in an unrelated affidavit later in 2015. I was in fact notified by her on this day and not in February 2014, as the panel claimed. Importantly, at this stage Walter only represented Carnilinx as attorney, so the further claim by the panel that she represented several tobacco firms which SARS was investigating at this time was factually incorrect too.

There were two other things in those early days that Walter and I had to deal with from my side. Whereas I was initially under the impression that her role at FITA was just a ‘sideshow’ and nothing very serious, it became increasingly clear that this was not the case. So I raised this issue with her too. This time she asked me a favour. She told me that the next annual meeting of FITA was scheduled for 21 November 2013, and she did not anticipate being re-elected. She asked me just to wait until then, as she could bring about a natural end to the relationship. It seemed a fair request.

However, on the day of the AGM, she sent me a text message, stating that she had been re-elected. I immediately sent a message back, saying again that it was her choice, but we could not continue our relationship if she accepted re-election. On the same day she sent an email to all FITA members, resigning as chairperson, copying in SARS as well as me. (Again, the SARS panel I have already mentioned also missed the little fact that I had indeed received notification of her resignation on this day.) So, all in all, whatever might have been perceived conflicts for me or her were now removed as far as I was concerned. And I believed she thought the same, because she made this point in writing to a newspaper later on.23

Another issue I believed we needed to deal with was her confession to me that she wasn’t tax compliant because she hadn’t declared all her income streams, notably those as a spy. At that time nobody yet knew she was such a spy, least of all the FITA members and Carnilinx. I had given her my word to keep this a secret. At the same time, I had to somehow make sure that she became tax compliant for obvious reasons, while ensuring that her role as spy wasn’t exposed within SARS or anywhere else, partly so as not to cause harm to the Illicit Tobacco Task Team’s own operations and partly to ensure her and her family’s safety. My only solution was to take a senior manager in my division and my direct line manager into confidence. I also disclosed the relationship to two other senior managers at this point. I found one of these managers to have known of her role as spy in any event, since he had been liaising with Chris Burger on many issues. (Even here, the SARS panel got it all wrong once again – they stated that I had only declared the relationship months later in February 2014.)

Some people have asked me why I pursued the relationship. I have thought about this long and hard, trying to come up with some sort of explanation that makes sense. I suppose I was persuaded by or attracted to what I thought was her genuine honesty and her vulnerability from the start. We were both single and I was very busy at work. She didn’t seem to mind my long hours and that I was only able to see her on weekends. And there was something important I believed we had in common: we were both fighting the bad guys.

The relationship certainly started off with a few surprises, but it actually developed rather slowly since we only really saw each other on the weekends. During the week, we stayed in contact via text and phone calls. That December, she accompanied me on travels through Namibia, Zambia and Mozambique, and we came to know each other a bit better. There were two incidents, which in hindsight should have caused alarm for me, both relating to her accessing my mobile phone without my permission. One instance occurred in Namibia, and the second in Mozambique. This meant that she would have had access not only to whomever I may have been calling or been called by, but all my text exchanges with colleagues, taxpayers and their representatives, and my entire email inbox at SARS. But the way she played it, when I found out, was that of a jealous girlfriend, and that was how I experienced it. Other than that, December was, shall I say, somewhat peaceful.

Things would begin to turn for the worse in January 2014. Earlier in November, we had spent a weekend in the Cape. Upon embarking in Johannesburg, as we were queuing, all squashed up as one always is, to get to the aeroplane’s exit, she switched on her mobile phone and messages starting coming in. I couldn’t help seeing one message she had opened, which stated that a certain amount of British pounds had been paid into an account. She looked at the message, then up at me, and said to me that I wasn’t supposed to see that. She would from that point refer to the person who had sent her the message as ‘the Pom’. I didn’t understand and didn’t feel comfortable about asking, as it was still early days in the relationship.

But in January 2014, when SARS was busy auditing her undeclared income streams, she confessed to me again in greater detail about ‘the Pom’. She explained that in conjunction with the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, and with the full blessing of the state, she was also a spy for BAT plc. She never gave me the nitty-gritty of it. We had some disagreements about how this could possibly have been legal, and eventually I advised her of the need to comply with the Financial Intelligence Centre Act since she was an attorney. I couldn’t believe that as an attorney she could be so naive to think such practices would be considered lawful. But she kept on assuring me it was all above board. I didn’t accept it, but then she was the lawyer, not me. I even asked a colleague for advice and passed this on to her. Walter in turn confirmed to me that she had complied with the advice, and I accepted that.

Walter’s great difficulty with the SARS audit was that she needed to demonstrate the exact income and the periods of earning. Suddenly she found ‘the Pom’ at BAT plc headquarters less than forthcoming. She needed to prove the income source and, because BAT refused to provide her with records of this, I advised her to put everything in writing to them. And so she did. She even, at one point, wrote to Martin Potgieter, the BATSA employee and part-time member of the Illicit Tobacco Task Team and TISA representative, and to the BAT CEO, Ben Stevens, in London. She also asked me to arrange to intercept her phone calls when she planned to call ‘the Pom’ and so record them. I told her that she should rather record them herself and gave some feeble excuse why I couldn’t help her. This conversation was via text and flies against the allegation she would later make that I had been intercepting her phone calls since as far back as May 2011 in order to ‘groom’ her.

More revelations were forthcoming. The manner in which she was being paid by BAT plc appeared to be criminal. They used so-called cash passports, debit cards used by travellers into which one deposits money that can be drawn worldwide. The thing about this particular scam is that these cards weren’t in her name. So the payments made to her by way of deposits in the United Kingdom, which she then withdrew from ATMs in South Africa, were totally off grid. Nobody knew of them. Ultimately, she self-recorded at least two conversations with ‘the Pom’, both of which incriminated ‘the Pom’ and BAT plc in possible bribery, corruption and money-laundering and in efforts to conceal these crimes from the state.24

It also became apparent from these conversations that ‘the Pom’ was indeed in close contact with Burger and Niemann of the Illicit Tobacco Task Team. She played these to me one evening at my home and I recorded them myself. She retained the originals.

BAT ultimately caved in and sent a detailed list of deposits made to her, every month for about a year, including cash payments she had collected in the United Kingdom from them, and also set out an amount still due to her. She privately gave me a copy of this.

By this time, I had reached the end of my tether. What else was she hiding from me? We began to have arguments and I started to distance myself from her, slowly but surely. But she kept on reassuring me that all was above board and approved by the state. I didn’t agree with her, and told her so, but she maintained the facade and said she was the lawyer – not me.

During the course of the relationship, we discussed the tobacco industry at great length at times. But these were private discussions, and I certainly never intended them to become public. She claimed to know all sorts of crazy things about Carnilinx’s directors, that they were supposedly involved ‘in drugs’ and in laundering money, that one had physically abused his wife, and so on. I never referred to these things in any conversations or submissions I made subsequently. But at this stage, as far as she was concerned, Carnilinx was one of the bad guys.

According to Walter, the Illicit Tobacco Task Team’s officials were also all corrupt to the core, abused her and some had made untoward advances to her. All were ‘in the pocket’ of TISA, BATSA and BAT plc: there was an unholy alliance between this task team’s key officials and BATSA, BAT plc and TISA. At one point, when I asked how it was possible that she as an attorney could associate herself with such behaviour, she said she didn’t know better and that she only really came to understand the true nature of things following discussions with me. To ‘redeem’ herself, she took it upon herself to expose what she knew. She asked me to introduce her to a journalist who, she said, should be someone I trusted completely and able to understand the tobacco industry with all its complexities.

The only person whose name jumped to mind at this stage was the financial journalist and editor of Business Times, Rob Rose. I met with Rose informally and said to him that Walter wished to meet with him and had all sorts of things to tell him. I explicitly stated they weren’t tax-related issues and that I could not be part of the discussions.25 I had little inkling of the true extent of the incestuous nature of the relations between officials of the task team, BATSA, BAT plc and TISA, and what I did know was limited to what Walter had chosen to share with me.

Walter met with Rose. I wasn’t present and to this day have limited knowledge of what was exchanged between them. In preparation for this, she downloaded lots of emails, text exchanges and other information from her older mobile handsets and data cloud from past years. In a few texts to me, she refers to these. She used these in her engagements with Rose to support her allegations. The media article ultimately authored by Malcolm Rees, one of Rose’s reporters at Business Times, the business section of the Sunday Times, was based on some of Walter’s evidence. It was published by Sunday Times on 30 March 2014 with the tile ‘BAT’s Smoke and Mirrors War on Rivals’. Walter completely sold the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, BATSA, BAT plc and TISA down the river. Whereas they had once been comrades in arms – and Carnilinx and the FITA members the criminals – suddenly SARS was the only good guy in the game. This was soon to change.

Our relationship had by this time become very strained and I began to see less and less of her. Things reached boiling point on the evening of 31 January 2014, when at a social gathering she disappeared, asking for my car keys, ostensibly to get a jacket from my car because she was cold, but she stayed away for an unusual amount of time. I asked a female friend of mine to check up on her, as I thought she might be in the bathroom. My friend came back and told me she had found Walter in my car, busy going through my mobile phone. This was the third such incident. Walter, clearly embarrassed by being found out in this way, returned and began to accuse me of infidelity. She stormed off in a huff back home.

The next day she told me what had happened on that fateful evening after she got home. She made contact with a director of Carnilinx, Kyle Phillips, asking him to ‘take her back’ and ‘provide for her financially’. In exchange she offered to assist them in their ongoing battles with the state. Phillips did not hesitate and arranged for an advocate, an attorney and the journalist Malcolm Rees to meet with him and Walter the very next day. At this meeting, Walter explained to them all that she was a spy for both BAT plc and the Illicit Tobacco Task Team. Apparently, she also made some nasty allegations about me. So by this time, it was now the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, BATSA, BAT plc, TISA and SARS who were the bad guys, and Carnilinx were suddenly the good guys again.26

Later in the afternoon of that same day, 1 February 2013, I drove past Walter’s home to see if she was okay. She had calmed down by then and let me in. We had a discussion and she then began to tell me that she had made a terrible mistake and elaborated upon what she had done, also showing me her texts to Phillips of the night before. She immediately began to withdraw what she had confessed to Carnilinx, the advocate, the lawyer and Rees, in various letters, emails and text exchanges to them.27 She even wrote to me a day or two later, apologising for defaming me, stating she had made up the allegations against me on the basis of ‘industry rumour’.28 In hindsight, I should have by this time run a mile. But I didn’t. I ascribed her behaviour to someone who had lived a double life and who hadn’t been properly debriefed by her handlers, and so I was instead quite sympathetic to her. This was the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life. We made peace.

Following these events, she addressed letters to Rose, Rees and various others at Sunday Times, in effect asking them to return the evidence she had given to them. They refused. Then it was the turn of the Sunday Times and some of their journalists to come under fire, with Walter accusing Rees of having accepted bribes, being offered a holiday and cocaine, to report in a biased manner, and another journalist of having supposedly received sportswear as a bribe from a tobacco manufacturer.29 Rees has denied these allegations and I believe that he was cleared by an internal investigation around this time.

She had flipped again, now reverting to the position that it was Carnilinx, the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, BATSA, BAT plc and TISA (as well as some Sunday Times journalists) who were the bad guys. SARS were the good guys again. This was to change again soon enough.

Having temporarily burnt her bridges with the Sunday Times and Business Times, she asked me again to introduce her to another journalist who could be trusted and would understand the complex world of cigarettes. This time I introduced her to the Mail & Guardian journalist Sam Sole under pretty much the same conditions as when she had met Rose a month or so earlier.30 Once again, she handed Sole all sorts of evidence in support of her stories. But now she was adamant that she needed the data on her handsets and in the cloud fully recovered and she asked me to help. I did. I accessed and downloaded whatever was in the data cloud and also asked a friend who had such a business to make mirror-images of the data on three of her handsets which she had given me. My friend did this professionally, and gave me two copies on memory sticks, both sealed in plastic evidence bags.31 I returned the handsets to Walter, as well as both memory sticks.32 She handed one back to me, saying I should keep it, and that I could use it for whatever reasons I chose. I think that at the time she didn’t think I would look at the data at all, because I just threw it in a basket among other junk that I kept on top of my fridge. I genuinely believed at the time that whatever may have been on that memory stick was limited to what she had shared with me and I saw no reason to look through it. It would only later become significant for me.

By this time, she had flipped back to the position that the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, BATSA, BAT plc, TISA, Carnilinx and the FITA members were the bad guys, for different reasons, and that SARS was the good guy again. The article by Sole was published in the Mail & Guardian on 20 March 2014, entitled ‘Big Tobacco in Bed with Law Enforcement’.

I had last seen Walter at the end of April 2014, and on 13 May I ended the relationship. I had had enough. More and more things were coming out and people were beginning to warn me to steer clear of her. I tried to remain civil at all times, whereas her texts to me became increasingly vitriolic. Things culminated in an attempt by her to extort money from me, asking me to pay her as a ‘source’ for SARS, or else she was going to release all text exchanges between us. I refused to be blackmailed and said so to her. She lied to me, saying that she had found an anonymous recording device delivered to her on 27 May 2014, supposedly with me ‘bragging’ that she was a ‘source’ for SARS whom SARS didn’t have to pay. I denied having said this and questioned the recording’s authenticity.33 She was subsequently never able to produce it when asked to do so and, ultimately, in 2015, admitted under oath that she had lied about this.34

What I didn’t know at the time, and only came to discover much later, was that Walter, just days before, had instituted legal action against BAT plc in the United Kingdom through her attorneys, demanding £5 million from them. She accused BAT of bribery, corruption, money-laundering and industrial espionage and threatened that should they not pay the money by a specified time into a lawyer’s trust account, she intended suing them in the United Kingdom. In this demand she threatened to sue the SSA at the same time for the same things.35 So at this point in time, all the oceans on the planet could not wash BAT plc, BATSA or the Tobacco Task Team of their sins.

On 27 May, she flipped again. This time, she went back to the fold of the Illicit Tobacco Task Team. According to a document Walter compiled later, Chris Burger had told her that her leaking of information to the Mail & Guardian and the Sunday Times, and their subsequent exposés of the Illicit Tobacco Task Team and BAT, had placed the latter in a difficult position and that she was on her own. But, according to Walter, there was a way out for her. Burger and Niemann of the task team then met with two unnamed National Prosecuting Authority officials and cut a deal. Walter was to withdraw her legal action against BAT plc and her threatened legal action against the task team. In return for this, she was to be given some kind of blanket amnesty from prosecution for all crimes she might have committed and would then receive their assistance against SARS and me.36 The Illicit Tobacco Task Team were once more the knights in shining armour, and SARS was suddenly the bad guy, as were Carnilinx and the other FITA members. Another flip.

The very next day, 28 May 2014, Walter launched an attack on me by way of an email, making all sorts of false allegations. This set off a sequence of events at SARS that soon presented all of my and other enemies of SARS with an opportunity to attack the institution from all sides.

Her allegations and what followed in their wake had disastrous consequences, with over 55 managers and over 500 skilled staff leaving the institution: the restructuring that followed and the subsequent underperformance of SARS left the government poorer for many years to come.

On 27 June 2014, Walter upheld her end of the deal with the task team and wrote to BAT plc and withdrew her legal demand for £5 million, blaming me for supposedly causing a division between BAT and their local counterparts. All was forgiven. Suddenly, BAT and the Illicit Tobacco Task team were the good guys again and SARS were the dogs.

Walter’s allegations against SARS were rather underdeveloped at first. Her attack on the institution would later morph and adapt as the wind blew, and as more enemies of SARS began to operate in support of each other, some in tandem and others simply using the opportunity she presented. This would culminate in a narrative that turned a rather nondescript, tiny investigative unit at SARS into a fictitious ‘rogue’ intelligence unit that was involved in a host of supposed illegal and unlawful activities. It was all hogwash, but the claims were bolstered by one-sided ‘internal probes’ and leaks to the media by ‘anonymous sources and intelligence officers’, all of which basically sought to confirm the ‘rogue unit narrative’.

Walter had opened the door, and others then kicked it in. The attack suited everybody, including Walter and her cohorts in the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, BATSA and BAT. All their sins were simply ignored and suppressed and never saw the light of day during the subsequent ‘probes’.

I only really awoke to elements of the rationale behind the ‘rogue unit narrative’ when Walter began claiming, under oath and in letters to the media and through press releases and legal notices, that I had unlawfully intercepted her communications since May 2011, which is a period of about three years prior to our having met. I knew then, instinctively, that there had to be a reason why she would make such a specific allegation. And then it dawned on me that I still had a copy of the memory stick lying in a basket on the top of my fridge with all her data on it. I began to work through it, and came to discover evidence which severely implicated her, members of the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, some tobacco manufacturers and the private security company FSS in a host of criminal activities, none of which she had ever told me or Rose or Sole about.

It was clear to me, then, that she needed to discredit that data. She needed to provide some or other explanation of how I had possession of it, and she needed to cover herself and others at all costs. If ever I was to produce the copy as evidence of their wrongdoings, she needed a means to say that I had obtained this evidence unlawfully.

Behind the scenes, she needed to cover the tracks too. On 8 August 2014, Walter met with Niemann, Burger and Jonker at a café in Brooklyn, Pretoria. In a subsequent email to them, she basically admitted to having given me access to the data and claimed she had also given it to the Hawks. I have no doubt that the three members of the task team were suddenly all very worried about what I was going to do with the data. And this gave further impetus to their joining in what later became known as the ‘rogue unit narrative’. They all had to ensure that nobody ever looked at that data in detail.

On this same day in August Walter also sent off an email to Malcolm Rees, who had, it seems, suddenly become unbothered by the allegations she threw at him and the Sunday Times earlier that year. This would form the basis for his first front-page article entitled ‘Love Affair Rocks SARS’ on 10 August 2014.37 This article was the precursor of a series that originated and developed the ‘rogue unit’ narrative. After this article appeared, I and, later, others at SARS became fair game to everybody and anybody that had a grievance about us.

Walter’s ‘confessions’ to Carnilinx on 1 February 2013 would later become the basis upon which the company took on the behemoth BATSA publicly, by applying for an interdict against them and Walter in August 2014. By this time Carnilinx was still her enemy. In reply, Walter attacked them on a range of personal issues and also accused me and the acting SARS commissioner, Ivan Pillay, of having conspired with Carnilinx to bring the interdict against her and BATSA, in exchange for tax leniency. Pure nonsense, but that was how the wind blew for her then. Carnilinx’s directors, according to her, were organised criminals and SARS was just plain bad for conspiring with them.

Predictably so, perhaps, following the interdict application Walter soon made peace with Carnilinx, agreeing to work with them against BATSA, BAT plc, TISA and SARS. Pretty soon, she was on retainer with Carnilinx, and apparently being paid the sum of R50,000 per month via another attorney’s billing system.38 But this truce didn’t last long either.39 By 2015, when it came for her to sign an affidavit in which she admitted that while acting as an attorney for Carnilinx she had betrayed some of their business information to BAT plc, she flipped again and refused to do so. This document, unsigned but compiled by Walter herself, concluded as follows: ‘I further admit the following. I was at all times an admitted attorney of the High Court of South Africa and owed Carnilinx a fiduciary duty of trust. I breached the fiduciary duty of trust in that I disclosed confidential information of Carnilinx’s business information to BAT UK. I received financial reward for disclosing confidential information to BAT UK, from BAT UK. I was offered a financial reward. BAT UK’s representatives, Colin Daniels (Denyer) and Allan Evans, offered and indeed paid me a reward for acting improperly. BAT UK, duly represented by Allan Evans and Colin Daniels, were at all material times aware that I was the attorney acting for and on behalf of Carnilinx and that I was the attorney for various other cigarette manufactures and that I was the chairperson for FITA. I now accept, and understand that my conduct, at the time, was improper.’40 Soon enough, in the light of this information, Carnilinx registered a criminal case against TISA, BAT plc, BATSA, Walter, and officials of the Illicit Tobacco Task Team and SARS in 2015, confirming that the honeymoon was now over for all concerned.41 Then they moved into higher gear by bringing a civil action against TISA and their and BATSA’s security arm, FSS, in the Western Cape High Court. They ultimately lost the case on a technicality.42

Then, by a strange twist of fate, in 2016 an FSS operative, Daniel François van der Westhuizen, broke ranks and provided evidence that exposed Walter as an informant for FSS. In text exchanges as late as February 2015, while she was supposedly back on side with Carnilinx, she passed on to FSS information about Carnilinx’s business activities. This means that whilst she was working for Carnilinx, supposedly acting in their interests against BATSA and FSS, she still kept the line open to FSS.43

At the time of writing this book, Walter seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. There is no trace of her online or on social media, and she seems no longer to be registered as an attorney. To this day, I regret my involvement with her – as do many others, I believe.