Читать книгу Tobacco Wars - Johann van Loggerenberg - Страница 6

It was early in December 2013.1 The small boardroom at the South African Revenue Service (SARS) head office in Brooklyn, Tshwane was littered with link charts, files and empty coffee cups. We had been scouring records of tobacco importations for hours, looking for clues and direction to give impetus to our investigations into the tobacco industry. It had been a long day, people were tired, but we were onto something big. Around me at the small table sat Pete, the head of the Central Projects Unit; Moods, the manager of the Tactical Intervention Unit; Portia, who oversaw the National Projects Unit; Thabo, who accounted for the Evidence Management and Technical Support Unit; and Guillam, who coordinated the High-Risk Investigation Unit. All these units and officials were deeply involved in different parts of our investigation, codenamed Project Honey Badger.

Those of us sitting around the table in the messy boardroom had an overall picture of what was going on. We had import and export statistics for the preceding months, which we had received from the Excise division; weekly stock reports of all tobacco manufacturers, which were checked by Moods’s unit; weekly reports of the numbers of trucks that had entered and exited all manufacturing plants, which were collected by Guillam’s small unit; and financial information collected by Portia’s and Pete’s people. Somewhere hidden in this pile of numbers, tables, graphs and data was the secret to what I believed to be the largest illicit manufacturing operation in the country. And we were determined to bust them.

Moods suddenly became quite animated and I immediately realised he had found what we were looking for. He smiled and shifted the piece of paper towards me. This was it. We had them. Moods had found records of very high volumes of imports of tobacco into South Africa by a company none of us had ever heard of before. This made it very odd to start with. Why would an unknown company be importing so many containers of tobacco into South Africa through the Cape Town harbour? We checked the export records and found that the very same company, SureSmoke (Pty) Ltd (not its real name), was importing these volumes, and then exporting them to Lesotho to a company, Smoke&Mirrors (Pty) Ltd, which was also unknown to any of us. We all knew that there was no significant tobacco production plant in Lesotho, so why on earth would Smoke&Mirrors be importing these huge volumes? It didn’t make sense. Immediately Moods’s team placed detention notices on fifteen imported containers, each containing about 12 tons of tobacco, pending further investigation.

That same evening, Jack and Nelson, both seasoned investigators of the Tactical Intervention Unit, were on their way to Lesotho. Moods picked up the phone and gave SureSmoke’s director, Hennie du Preez, a call. They wanted to meet and ask him a few questions.

Late the next day, Moods called me. ‘JvL, we’ve got them.’ Moods gave me the lowdown. ‘I’ve had a long discussion with Du Preez. He spilt the beans almost immediately.’ I listened. Moods was very experienced and could get to the bottom of a scheme quickly. ‘Du Preez explained to us that he was approached by ABC Tobacco Manufacturers long ago. They knew he still had SureSmoke, it was still registered at SARS, had a bonded warehouse licence and an import code with us, so they wanted to use SureSmoke as a front. SureSmoke would be off radar with us, because it had been on record for so many years. They paid him fifty grand for this – in cash. He’s given us the whole story. We are busy taking down his affidavit now.’

I told Moods to check if there were any more imports of SureSmoke on the way to South Africa. Within minutes Moods called back. ‘There are another fifteen containers in the harbour as we speak. Each has just over 12 tons of tobacco. To be precise, 12,210 kilograms each. We’ve just placed detention notices on all of them too. They’re sealed and locked. We are watching them.’ By using the powers of SARS to detain imported containers, Moods would force the owner of the goods to come forth and own up to the tobacco. ABC Tobacco Manufacturers were now in a bit of a bind. If they wanted their tobacco, they’d have to show their hand. It became a waiting game.

There was a lot of tobacco involved: 183 tons of tobacco to be precise, or roughly 183 million potential cigarettes. Considering that the excise value of a pack of smokes was about R15 at the time, the whole consignment would have delivered about R137 million in excise duties to the fiscus. It was a remarkable bust.

The following day, Moods called again. ‘Just got a call from Nelson. They’re back from Lesotho.’ I listened. ‘They’ve unravelled the whole scheme. We’ve got ABC Tobacco: red-handed. They’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s game over for them.’

Later that same day, Moods, Nelson and Jack met me and explained what they had discovered in Lesotho. ‘We drove straight to the address on the bill of entry for Smoke&Mirrors,’ said Nelson. ‘When we got there, it was clear this wasn’t a tobacco plant. The Lesotho Revenue Authority guys helped us tremendously. They helped us track the director of Smoke&Mirrors. He was very cooperative. He told us that he had met with the directors of ABC Tobacco months ago in Sandton. They basically asked to use Smoke&Mirrors for their imports. Because Smoke&Mirrors had stopped trading several years ago, it didn’t bother to deregister there. A former Lesotho customs officer who still had an official stamp was paid to stamp the documents purporting to show that the tobacco went into Lesotho. It never did.’

So this is how it worked. ABC Tobacco used SureSmoke in South Africa to pretend that it was importing tobacco through South Africa, destined for Smoke&Mirrors in Lesotho. The tobacco would come in through the harbour in 40-foot containers, be loaded onto trucks, supposedly on the way to Lesotho but would never reach there. Instead, the trucks would proceed to another warehouse and offload the tobacco at ABC Tobacco. Export documents would be stamped by the former Lesotho customs officer, claiming that the tobacco had entered Lesotho, though it hadn’t. It was all pure fraud.

Now, Project Honey Badger sat on ABC Tobacco’s 183 tons of tobacco in the harbour while ABC Tobacco held back and considered what to do. ABC Tobacco was in trouble. They ordered the tobacco from a supplier in South America on credit. The supplier wanted its money and didn’t care much for what was unfolding in South Africa. ABC Tobacco was getting squeezed from all sides. They had to pay for the tobacco but couldn’t claim it from SARS because then they’d have to admit it was theirs. I told Moods and the others that we should wait. Soon enough ABC Tobacco would have to show their hand. So we waited.

In the meantime, Project Honey Badger was in full swing. We were busy preparing criminal charges, carrying out in-depth audits of manufacturers, drawing up lifestyle audit questionnaires, arranging verifications and preparing the paperwork to cancel warehouse licences if those found wanting did not come clean. The entire cigarette manufacturing world in South Africa was abuzz. Some began to contact us to make arrangements to put their tax and excise affairs in order. Moods’s team was busy cracking cases all over the country. Our preliminary figures from the Risk and Strategy division showed that excise payments had increased significantly since Project Honey Badger began to gain traction, showing an increase over the same period of almost 25 percent compared with prior years.2 Honey Badger looked like it was beginning to have the desired effect.

On 13 May 2014, Moods walked into my office. He had just concluded the affidavit of Du Preez, who had given him a pile of documents and more details of what had happened. He held a piece of paper in his hands, and he looked rather glum. I frowned and asked him what was wrong. He just shook his head and put the piece of paper on my desk. I picked it up and studied it. It was a document, signed long ago, in which Du Preez gave permission to a third party to sign documents and conduct transactions on behalf of SureSmoke. It was signed by a woman whom I had just recently started dating. I had no idea of the extent of her involvement. I reached for my smartphone and sent her a message: ‘I’m done.’

Days later, on 28 May 2014, all hell broke loose. I asked SARS to place me on special leave and walked out of my office, for the last time, as it turned out. In November I was suspended very soon after Tom Moyane had taken the helm at SARS. In December 2014 more senior SARS officials were suspended. By 2015, Project Honey Badger existed in name only. The five units and other parts of SARS that had collaborated to take on the tobacco industry had all been decimated or disbanded. It was game over.

Years later I spoke to one of the directors of ABC Tobacco. He said to me: ‘Ja, you had us there. We were in trouble … We were very lucky because of what happened at SARS. We got away with it, sure.’ He chuckled.

This episode sums up for me many of the themes and patterns that will unfold in this book. In it, you will meet many of the companies and people involved in the South African tobacco industry, and learn about the shenanigans in the tobacco trade, which have never been revealed publicly before. You will learn how the different sides began to come to blows, in many instances using the dirtiest of tricks imaginable. And you will discover how a handful of state officials and law enforcement agencies were captured and used to advance the commercial agendas of some players in the industry, at the expense of others. You will come to know the characters involved in these wars: they can variously be described as shrewd, conniving, double-dealing, criminal, colourful; a mixture of chancers, mavericks, rascals and opportunists. You will come to understand how state institutions and officials, politicians, organised criminals, industry players and big money all came to be so enmeshed that the tobacco industry can fairly claim to be one of the murkiest, corrupt and venal in southern Africa.

The independent tobacco manufacturer Yusuf Kajee once said in 2010: ‘There’s no pussy-footing around this: organised crime is ugly and illicit trade fuels crime with guns, drugs and hijackings.’3 The very next year, Kajee’s warnings proved true. In January 2011, a police officer, Johan Nortje, was killed in his driveway on a Monday morning. He had been a key investigator in an operation with SARS codenamed Duty Calls, which had netted over R120 million of seized contraband in Durban. Two men were seen running away from scene but were never arrested or convicted. The murder remains unsolved. In the weeks before Nortje’s murder, there had been two other attempts to kill customs officials in Durban.

In the same year, SARS spokesperson Adrian Lackay told the media, ‘Customs officials are being targeted by smuggling syndicates. We have decided that we do not wish to disclose too much information, as doing so might well increase the risk that our officials are facing. Late last year, a SARS official in Durban was shot and seriously wounded. This was the second time he had been attacked. There have been other incidents too. We believe that our officials are under threat.’4

In 2011, Glenn Agliotti, notorious for his role in the killing of mining magnate Brett Kebble, and for bringing down his friend, former police commissioner Jackie Selebi, in a corruption case admitted to smuggling cigarettes. Agliotti seems to have been involved in the cigarette game for some time, because in 2006 one of his ‘associates’, Anthony Dormehl, stated under oath that he was asked by Agliotti to organise storage space for four incoming containers of untaxed Marlboro cigarettes. He said that Agliotti used to call him with instructions as to who should pick up the contraband. Agliotti was still at it in 2014, meeting two people in the trade and proposing all sorts of hare-brained schemes to smuggle tobacco.5 In November 2016, someone arranged a meeting, where I found Agliotti, who suggested I ‘front’ for him and another person to open up a tobacco manufacturing plant in South Africa. I laughed.6

In October 2014, a van belonging to a tobacco manufacturer was hijacked at Sebenza on the East Rand. It was one of many such incidents reported in this year. In December, a hijacking led to the death of a bystander in Moreleta Park, during a shooting between the hijackers and police. In May 2015, the media reported that an underworld war had broken out between three gangs, one from Johannesburg and two from Cape Town, involving control of the multibillion-rand industries of illegal cigarettes and drugs. At least six people were murdered in Cape Town in the spate of this battle. In 2016, a driver of one of cigarette manufacturer Carnilinx’s trucks, en route to the Eastern Cape, was shot through the face in a hijacking attempt. In February 2017, a well-known debt collector and former nightclub bouncer, who reportedly had links to the illegal cigarette trade, Raymond ‘Razor’ Barras, was shot in the head and chest and killed while sitting in his car in his driveway at home.7 In January 2018, eight hijackers posing as police officers robbed a truck transporting tobacco products in Mitchells Plain outside Cape Town.

It also came to light in 2019 that one tobacco grouping had allegedly used ‘gang networks in Ryger Park to carry out a (failed) assassination’ of tobacco-whistleblower Luis Pestana, in an incident where his bodyguard, Gerard Strydom, was shot and wounded.8 As recently as January 2019, it emerged in an official report compiled by a Western Cape police intelligence officer that a ‘hit’ (assassination) was ordered on an employee of Carnilinx, controversial strongman and self-confessed killer Mikey Schultz. The officer thought it important and serious enough to report this and warn Schultz of the impending danger to his life. Around this same time, a whistleblower and his wife were reported to have received threats to their safety after exposing the controversial findings from research conducted on behalf of the big tobacco companies.

The fact of the matter is that the tobacco business is as dirty and nasty as it is dangerous.