Each layer had been slowly built up over the years. At first, the foundation seemed solid, with small local contracts in North West that matched up with what CMS Water was capable of delivering. 

But over time, as the tower got taller, more cards were added – bigger contracts and new subcontractors all piling on top and causing the base layer to buckle under the increased burden.

In 2022, it seemed like someone had finally flicked a card away and knocked the tower over.

Losing the R291-million Rooiwal wastewater treatment plant project should have been the end of CMS Water Engineering. 

It wasn’t. 

While the company was collapsing, its boss Rudolf Schoeman Jnr was extracting one last contract from government: a R368-million deal to maintain what government calls “the most important bulk water supply system in the country”.

1 in 3 people in South Africa

The Integrated Vaal River System supplies water to one in three people in the country: it covers the whole of Gauteng, most of Eskom’s power stations, and mines and farms in Mpumalanga, North-West, and the Free State.

In April 2022, CMS had been awarded a three-year contract for the “installation, maintenance, repair, refurbishment and upgrade” of pump stations in this system for the National Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS).

If anyone knew – or should have known – how destructive and incompetent CMS was, it was the national department.

For the past two years, municipalities and water boards had been begging CMS to complete the contracts it had already been awarded. In Zeerust, Sannieshof, Potchefstroom, Mahikeng, Parys and Hammanskraal, CMS’s projects were plagued by delays, unpaid staff, equipment that had been paid for but never delivered, and projects that had ground to a halt.

But ignoring all the warning signs, the Department appointed CMS as one of six companies to maintain critical pump stations with a budget of R368-million. Director-General Sean Phillips, who has relentlessly campaigned to clean up corruption in the water industry, even signed the contract. 

Skating through undetected

Asked how the Department could have been oblivious to CMS’s destructive role in the water industry, spokesperson Wisane Mavasa told us that the Department does not get involved in municipal tenders, so any red flags around CMS Water would not have been “readily available”.

Tenders for water and wastewater treatment plants are generally managed by municipalities or water boards, with no oversight or regulation from the national department. This means that when a contractor, like CMS Water, is not delivering, the department is largely oblivious. 

“[The Department] only restricts the appointment of service providers that are flagged on the National Treasury list,” she added.

Treasury maintains a list of tender defaulters – people or companies that have failed to complete a tender or lied to secure a contract and, as a result, have been blacklisted from government work for 10 years. 

But Treasury can’t add defaulters to the list: it has to wait for the local municipality to cancel the contract and then report the company for blacklisting – and that process that can take years. 

The City of Tshwane has made several attempts to blacklist tenderpreneur Edwin Sodi and his companies over the failed Rooiwal wastewater treatment plant tender, but to date his name is not on the list.

What this means is that despite Sodi being on trial for corruption, fraud and money laundering over an earlier tender to identify asbestos houses in the Free State, there is still nothing that officially prevents him or his companies from securing more governments contracts.

Horrific track record

Aside from Treasury, another system that should have detected CMS Water’s equally horrific track record was the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB).

CIDB grades are given to companies to demonstrate they have the necessary experience to complete big infrastructure projects. The grades are awarded based on the value of the contracts a company has completed in the past, but the system is also designed to raise red flags when a project fails.

“All public sector clients must register projects of +R200 000 in value on the CIDB Register of Projects,” spokesperson Kotli Modise explained. “They must register these projects at the point of contract award, project completion, project termination and project cancellation.”

The Register is not public, but municipalities and government departments have access to it.

“Unfortunately, not all clients comply… Projects that are not registered … are impossible to track as they bypass the system,” she explained.

The R85-million Bospoort contract, that we covered in Part 2, was never added to the Register, nor was the Sannieshof (R80-million) contract, which was cancelled in early 2022. The Zeerust contract (R91-million for the mechanical and electrical portion) was one of the few included in the Register but was listed as “active” even after the Ngaka Modiri Molema municipality cancelled the contract in June 2022.

Oblivious to these developments, the department signed the final contract in June 2022. 

The wolf at the door

The three-year DWS contract was a proverbial life raft to CMS Water’s sinking ship. 

A former CMS employee, who only agreed to speak to us if we hid their identity, told us: “Rudolf said … he will still keep CMS going with the DWS contract and finish the Rooiwal project as well.”

It also gave Rudolf the ammunition he needed to fight the liquidators now banging on CMS’s door.

In April 2022, the local Caltex garage in Orkney had run out of patience, and asked the North West high court to liquidate CMS for failing to pay its R563 000 petrol tab.

This amount by itself shouldn’t have brought a company like CMS Water to its knees – only a few months earlier it had recorded R98-million in turnover. However, it didn’t take long before another company came knocking with their own claim.

CMS Global Solutions was a monster of Rudolf’s own creation. In 2017, he and his business partner, Eric du Plessis, had established CMS Global in order to acquire big-ticket civil engineering contracts. But after a nasty fallout between the partners in 2020, CMS Global had gone belly-up. 

Judy Muchiiri, one of Rudolf’s business partners, told us: “[Rudolf] kept on saying that Eric is coming for him… Eric is coming for the plane. Eric is coming for the yacht, Eric is coming for the house. So, he made it look like Eric was trying to finish him.”

Now, the liquidators for CMS Global were demanding that CMS Water pay over R23-million from incomplete government projects that CMS Global had worked on. 

Although there was never a formal contract between the two companies, the liquidators suspected that R638-million worth of government contracts that were awarded to CMS Water were de facto CMS Global’s contracts.

“[T]he projects were tendered by utilising CMS Water, as agreed by Rudolf, but CMS Global attended to the contracts … it was agreed that the funds of CMS Global would be channelled through CMS Water,” the liquidators wrote in an affidavit.

In August 2022, the liquidators filed an urgent application in the North West high court to have CMS Water placed in provisional liquidation. 

However, in a classic move from the Rudolf’s playbook, he told the North West high court that liquidating CMS Water would affect the “lives of literally millions of people” and “would mean that almost half of the country could be plunged into darkness”.

Old habits die hard

CMS Water had been assigned two areas under the DWS contract: the Vaal water scheme, which supplies water to the Lethabo and Grootvlei power stations, and the Usutu Vaal scheme, which supplies the Tutuka, Matla, Kriel, Duvha, Kendal and Kusile power stations and Sasol’s Secunda plant.

Indirectly, CMS Water was now responsible “for providing electricity to more than 40% of the country”, Rudolf wrote in an affidavit filed in the liquidation case.

“[W]e are responsible for maintaining the pump stations which provides cooling water to the main power stations of Eskom… All of the aforementioned pump stations are national key points… Should this contract be terminated, a large part of the country could be plunged into darkness as the contract is already 10 years behind schedule and the existing infrastructure is deteriorating at a rapid rate,” he claimed.

“Additional to this, we are responsible for maintaining the pump stations responsible for providing process water to the Sasol petroleum plant situated in Secunda. Should our contract be terminated, the complete Sasol plant could come to a standstill which will result in major fuel and/or petroleum shortages nationwide.”

Exaggeration had been Rudolf’s go-to legal strategy when the Bospoort and Rooiwal contracts were threatened. 

Believing it might work again, he added a final dramatic flourish: “Should the liquidation order be made final, it will result in the project being cancelled… Should the tender be cancelled and re-advertised, it would mean that almost half of the country could be plunged into darkness until such a time a new contractor is appointed.”

But Rudolf was overplaying his hand: CMS would be in charge of repairs to the pump stations that move water between the different water schemes, only if repairs were needed and only once the Department had accepted CMS Water’s quotes. 

Still, as with many things at CMS Water, there remains a lingering question: if the R368-million DWS contract had come through slightly sooner, would it have been enough to save the company?

“As long as Rudolf was alive, he was opposing the liquidation with all his might, saying that we can save CMS and that this is nothing to worry about and that with the DWS tenders that’s been awarded to us, we are going to fix everything,” a second CMS employee told us.

The death knell tolls

With Rudolf fighting off the liquidation and a growing list of creditors, CMS Water was fast running out of assets to auction. Even parts bought for the Rooiwal project weren’t safe, as the City of Tshwane discovered. 

In an email to auctioneers in September 2022, a city official wrote: “It has been brought to City of Tshwane’s attention that the Fine Bubble Diffusers Aeration belonging to the City of Tshwane is under auction. May you please release the equipment as they belong to City of Tshwane.”

In spite of everything, Rudolf seemed reluctant to accept that CMS Water would soon have to close its doors.

“[I]t is virtually impossible for an institution with an order book of over R 2 000 000 000 [to] be commercially insolvent,” he confidently told the North West high court in October 2022.

But CMS’s books were misleading.

Typically, “trade receivables” – money owed by clients – is treated as an asset on a company’s books, and according to the official management accounts, CMS Water was still owed R35-million by clients. These were largely retention payments, the final 10 percent of a contract, paid once a project has been handed over and any snag lists resolved. 

But in most instances, CMS’s contracts had been cancelled, and in some, municipalities were looking for damages.

“[H]oe gaan jy retensie kry op ‘n projek waarvan jy afgegooi is? As die terminasiebrief inkom, verloor jy enige regte op retensie,” the long-time staff member told the liquidators. (“[H]ow are you going to get retention on a project you’ve been dumped from? If the termination letter comes in, you lose any rights to retention.”) 

“[O]ns het al hierdie goed vir hulle almal gesê en dan daai Rudolf sal jou sommer reguit vra of jy dom-onnosel is.” (“[W]e told them all this stuff and then Rudolf will ask you straight up if you are a dumb idiot.”)

“Ja, hy’s ‘n regte asshole,” another staff member added. “En al hierdie goed het ek vir hom gesê … hierdie gaan jou in die gat byt en kyk waar sit ons.” (“Yeah, he’s a real asshole. And I told him all this stuff … this is going to bite you in the ass and see where we sit.”)

In January 2023, CMS Water was placed into provisional liquidation, and control of the company handed over to the liquidators. 

For all intents and purposes, this should have been the end of CMS Water. But like a zombie clawing its way out of the dirt, CMS Water simply refused to die without a fight – or at least without lining a few more pockets along the way.

Selby and the zombie 

Selby Construction is a civil engineering firm based in Tzaneen, Limpopo. 

Years earlier, Selby’s directors had been implicated in the On Point Engineering scandal that diverted millions from the Limpopo Department of Roads and Transport to a family trust controlled by Julius Malema, then leader of the ANC Youth League.

Selby had survived the scandal, after the NPA withdrew corruption charges, and in 2021, had bid on the same DWS tender that CMS was awarded.

Selby lost out. But, comically, the decision to award the contract to CMS Water, coincided with CMS’s decision to retrench all its staff. 

Sensing an opportunity, owner Selby Manthata stepped in.

In September 2022, Manthata signed an agreement with Rudolf to execute the DWS contract on CMS Water’s behalf. The deal, which is described in the liquidation papers, was that Selby Construction would do the work and take 65% of the profits, but that the contract (and 35% of the profits) would remain in CMS Water’s name. 

Between November 2022 and March 2023, Selby kept CMS on life support, executing R853 000 of work on the Department of Water and Sanitation contract on its behalf.

When CMS Water’s outstanding tax bill of R500 000 threatened to derail the contract, Selby paid that as well.

“That was part of our agreement, we [would] pay SARS on their behalf,” owner Manthata told us.

The Department claims to have been in the dark about Selby’s role in maintaining the pump stations that, in Rudolf’s words, keep the lights on for “more than 40% of the country”.

Wisane Mavasa, the Department’s spokesperson, told us: “All the documents … that were submitted to [the Department] belong to CMS. Payments were also made into CMS’s bank account and not Selby Construction. Furthermore, DWS has a list of sub-contractors that were nominated by CMS when they submitted their bid, and Selby Construction is not one of those nominated subcontractors.” 

Manthata disputes this but declined to provide us with a copy of the letter that he said shows the Department was wise to the arrangement.

In the end, Manthata told us, he was shafted as well: “There’s no payment that came from CMS to me. They’re owing us, even now. That’s why we terminated the contract, because they are owing us,” Manthata told us.

Still not dead

Even though CMS was being pursued from all sides, it still had two things going for it: one, the DWS contract had two years left plus lots of unspent budget; and two, CMS still had a coveted grade 8 PE rating from the Construction Industry Development Board, meaning it qualified to bid for the most expensive government tenders.

Former CMS staff members told us that both Manthata and a former government official, Ntau Letebele, had shown an interest in buying CMS.

Letebele had been the head of Limpopo’s transport department but resigned amidst the same On Point Engineering scandal that had ensnared Manthata. 

During the last few months of Rudolf’s life, he and Letebele had become friends. Documents filed in the liquidation application suggest that Letebele had even started using a CMS email address. 

But when we spoke to Letebele last year, he denied that he ever had any real intention of buying the company. “Already at that time CMS was in trouble – that was common knowledge. So what would I be buying?” he said.

But the claim that Rudolf had agreed to sell CMS Water was not that far-fetched. Muchiiri, Rudolf’s Kenyan business partner told us that Rudolf was looking for a way out of South Africa.

“He kept on saying ‘South Africa is crashing, there’s load shedding, South Africa is crashing. I need to get out’,” she said.

Although Rudolf knew CMS was collapsing, he continued selling a pipe dream to what remained of his team – whipped up by his unique brand of charisma – that the right deal was coming their way soon.

“He was always working on ‘something so big is gonna come through, we’re gonna make so much money, I’m working on a massive thing’,” the first former employee told us. “He always said stuff like that, and all of his deals were too good to be true.”

The last night

One of the last photos of Rudolf was taken on 19 December 2022, the night of the ANC’s elective conference at Nasrec, and shows him at a table littered with empty Heineken bottles, Red Bull cans and bottles of Moët champagne. 

Hours earlier, Cyril Ramaphosa had been re-elected as party’s president, and in the photo Rudolf is seen celebrating the win with a table full of ANC members.

In the shot, he looks drunk and it’s clear he has lost a significant amount of weight. But even with CMS Water crumbling around him, he still believed he could wheel and deal his way out of it. So he bent down, put an arm around an ANC comrade, and smiled.

“Dit is wat ek nou doen,” he told the former employee, sending them the photo over WhatsApp. “Dit was 03:30 vanoggend. Ons het nou die regte team.” (“This is what I’m doing now. This was 03:30 this morning. We now have the right team”.)

***

Three months later, Rudolf Schoeman Jnr was dead. 

There had been an all-night party at the house, but no one present appears to have seen or heard anything, and Rudolf’s body was only discovered hours later in a downstairs room.

Despite the blood on his face and hands, the police concluded that his death was due to “natural causes”. It took another five months and urging from his family before police agreed to open an inquest into whether his death was suspicious.

Two years have passed, and the police have still not reached a conclusion about what led to Rudolf’s death.

“Police are still investigating,” police spokesperson Lt. Col. Mavela Masondo told us last year. “The police first receive the preliminary postmortem from the Department of Health and wait for the detailed postmortem report, which usually takes long. Once the detailed report is received, it’s then that the docket is taken to Inquest Court for a decision. In this case, the detailed postmortem report is still outstanding from the Department of Health.”

And a year later? The police told us they are still waiting for the detailed postmortem report. 

Theories we’ve heard in the course of our investigations are that Rudolf fell or died from a ruptured liver. But the obvious suspicion, that many people have voiced privately, is that he was killed when one of his many deals went south.

In the two years leading up to his death, Rudolf had become convinced that his life was in danger. “[E]very weekend he would call me and tell me ‘someone’s trying to kill me’,” Muchiiri told us. 

“It was always about a deal. There was nothing else. But sometimes it was also delusional… Like sometimes he would hear some noise in his house and be like ‘you see those guys are trying to sneak into my house, they want to try to kill me.’ I just never [knew].”

In the end, Rudolf died in a way that is eerily similar to how he lived: shrouded in mystery and surrounded by strangers.

The post DEADLY WATER (Part 5): A zombie in the water industry appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

Bryanston marked the beginning of the end for Rudolf Schoeman Jnr in more ways than one. 

In 2023, his body was discovered, covered in blood, in his luxury townhouse at Bryanston’s 70 on Berkeley. 

But in 2020, he had moved there full of ambition: “[H]e said that most of his meetings are in Joburg… He wants to move there closer to the people, to the decision-makers,” a former employee told us last year.

This was, in the words of one business associate, when things started exploding.

In 2019, CMS Water Engineering had secured a new business partner: alleged tenderpreneur Edwin Sodi. Soon they had three joint venture projects – Ntambanana (R67-million), Sterkfontein (R112-million) and Rooiwal (R291-million) – and were eyeing out new opportunities in Pietermaritzburg, Mthatha and a potential R850-million contract in Polokwane. 

In 2020, CMS was also given a slice of a R1.2-billion contract to build a new water treatment plant in Mmamashia, Botswana. 

But former staff members say that as CMS Water’s contracts got bigger, Rudolf’s own well-being deteriorated.

“I said to [people] numerous times, I really wish you had met Rudolf before … I wish you had met the businessman that I came to know because that guy – jis – he would have taken us places,” the former employee told us. “If that guy was still here today, I would still be working for CMS. Because that guy knew something, but then all of a sudden something changed.”

“The biggest downfall for CMS was when Rudolf moved to Bryanston. That’s when everything collapsed,” a second employee told us. 

Rudolf, they said, often had guests over at his house until the early hours of the morning with alcohol flowing freely, for what he described as “networking purposes”. Several people told us that Rudolf had long struggled with addiction and substance abuse and had done several stints in rehab. 

Now, those demons began spilling over into CMS’s work as well. 

“[A]l wat … die kliënt wou gehad het, was Rudolf moet net actually nugter op ‘n site meeting opdaag sodat ons kan ‘n plan maak,” a former staff member would later tell CMS Water’s liquidators. (“All … the client wanted was Rudolf to just actually show up sober to a site meeting so we could make a plan.”)

“Hulle het foto’s van hom waar … hy’s uitgepass binne in die bakkie voor die meeting,” (They have photos of him where … he was passed out inside the van before the meeting.)

“9 uur in die oggend,” another staff member added. (“at 9 o’clock in the morning.”)

CMS was already falling behind on several major projects. The upgrade to the Zeerust wastewater treatment plant – a R129-million project in North West – should have been completed in October 2020, but the project was nowhere near done and for months the consulting engineers had been pleading with CMS to get back to work.

In the same municipality, the R50-million upgrade to the Sannieshof wastewater treatment plant was also going badly. The deadline for the project was September 2021, but a feud between Rudolf and his business partner had stalled the project, and unpaid workers had blockaded the site.

“[Die kliënte] het die laaste ruk … hoeveël keer vir ons gesê, ‘gaan net aan, maar moenie laat Rudolf naby ons kom nie, moenie dat hy meetings toe kom nie, moenie laat hy sites toe kom nie…’” (“[The clients] have told us how many times in the last while, just keep going, but don’t let Rudolf come near us, don’t let him come to the meetings, don’t let him come to the sites…”)

Vleisgeld

By 2021, CMS’s revenue had increased, but so too had the company’s overdraft.

After falling out with Eric Du Plessis (his erstwhile partner) Rudolf had lost access to their company plane. Now he bought a bigger one: a Cessna 414 Chancellor. 

A R7-million plane was not excessive for a company of CMS’s size – in 2021, it recorded R128-million in revenue – but it was symbolic of a new, less-cautious way of doing business.

In early 2021, Rudolf announced that he had found a new source of revenue for the business: “hy noem dit sy vleisgeld,” a former staff member would later tell CMS’s liquidators. (He calls it his meat money.)

Through one of his connections, Rudolf had met Judy Muchiiri, a Kenyan woman who had a business sourcing and exporting lamb to the Middle East: “Judy is ‘n … makelaar – sy koop vleis by ander mense aan, sit haar winsie by en verkoop dit… in Oman en Koeweit,” the staff member explained. (Judy is a … broker – she buys meat from other people, puts in her profit and sells it … in Oman and Kuwait.)

If this sounds strange to you, it sounded no better inside CMS Water. Rudolf, with his love of luxury brands and city life, had no discernible expertise in the meat export business.

“[H]y’t vir my vertel hy gaan nou so baie geld maak met hierdie vleis,” the long-time staff member said. “[O]ns het van die begin af gedink dis ‘n scam, want daar’s geen dokumentasie, daar’s nie papierwerk nie, daar’s nie ‘n kontrak nie, daar’s niks nie.” (“[H]e told me he’s going to make so much money with this meat … [W]e thought it was a scam from the beginning, because there’s no documentation, there’s no paperwork, there’s no contract, there’s nothing.”)

From internal CMS documents, we know that at least one shipment of 80 lambs was exported to Kenya in March 2021, and an invoice issued to Muchiiri’s Yasram Meat Company for R347 256.

“Sy sou ons toe nou betaal het, [maar] sy’t ons nie betaal nie,” the long-time staff member said. (“She should have paid us already, [but] she didn’t pay us.)

Unperturbed, Rudolf announced he had done another deal with Muchiiri. But from this point on the deals would be different: CMS would no longer source and export lamb, it would loan the money to Yasram, who would source the lamb and arrange the exports, and repay CMS’s loan with interest.

Over the next three months, CMS paid Yasram $243 333 (R3.6-million) to fund consignments of lamb. 

Internal company records show that Rudolf kept sending money to Yasram, even though Muchiiri was slow to send money back. By March 2022, CMS had sent Yasram R3.6-million and received R1.2-million in return. 

“En daai was een van die groot redes waar Rudolf en sy pa [uitgetval] het. Want dan sê sy pa vir hom, ‘Ek verstaan nie, ek verstaan nie hoekom nie?’ En dan sê Rudolf net ‘Ons gaan baie geld maak.’” (“And that was one of the big reasons Rudolf and his father [fell out]. Because then his father tells him ‘I don’t understand, I don’t understand why?’ And then Rudolf just says, ‘We’re going to make a lot of money.’”)

Kenya and the meat lady

This all sounded incredibly implausible to us. So we called Muchiiri and she answered: “Listen, Rudolf never dealt with someone without referrals,” she told us.

“Rudolf came to Kenya in 2021 with a friend of mine who is a diplomat, working with the South African government,” she said, but declined to provide a name. “And he was with two other people who were apparently getting him more government contact.”

Documents suggest that Rudolf was interested in bidding for a water infrastructure tender in Kenya. That project never materialised, but like South Africa, Kenya was full of temptations.

“[A]ll Rudolf did for the month he was here was drink, drink, drink. So I couldn’t understand … you’ve got this position in life, you’ve got this … company that is performing extremely well, why exactly would you be drinking your life away?” she said.

Muchiiri told us that it was during this trip that Rudolf offered to bankroll her meat export business.

“[H]is company in South Africa had issues … he wasn’t getting as many contracts as he was supposed to get … It’s like he was trying to get contracts in Kenya just to cover ground or just to try and make money because it’s like he’d lost so much. Because he kept on saying ‘there’s this tender that has not paid, there’s that tender that has not paid – things like that.’”

Rudolf’s “vleisgeld” project wasn’t recorded in CMS’s books, as far as we could tell, at least not where it should have been. 

By December 2021, FNB had started asking awkward questions, like, why was a water engineering company sending millions to a meat broker in Kenya? In response, CMS told the bank that the deal had been “terminated”.

Money kept trickling back for the next few months, but not enough to make the deal make sense.

“When he passed on, I spoke to his assistant and I told her to just calculate what came out to me and what came back and tell me the difference … I never heard from [her] again,” Muchiiri told us.

Friends and favours

Although CMS’s vital signs were deteriorating by mid-2021, Rudolf remained upbeat.

“He constantly called me and told me he’s unlocking this, unlocking that, and this is Ramaphosa’s person for this and that… Rudolf will meet somebody today and you would feel like he had known that person forever, and he would end up giving so much to that person,” Muchiiri said.

Amongst the CMS documents, we found a passenger manifest showing that Rudolf arranged to fly Vusimuzi Tshabalala, then the ANC’s chief whip of the Free State provincial legislature, to Lesotho on his private plane.

“They wanted to fly with me to Lesotho at that time but that never happened,” Tshabalala told us when we called him.

He had met Rudolf, he said, through a friend and the trip was related to Rudolf’s meat export business: “In my private capacity I had any right to associate myself with any business person who was in the industry of beef because it has always been my private ambition to be in that industry,” he told us in a follow-up WhatsApp message. 

He added: “It had nothing to do with any favours or anything.” 

But Rudolf’s largesse went beyond favours for the politically connected. Around this time, Rudolf had told Muchiiri that he had paid R6-million to an official in the hope of securing a water contract: “Rudolf called them the ‘Big Boys’ because they were asking for money upfront to be able to do stuff for him. Whoever he was dealing with in the government, whoever was promising him jobs, I think they really put him [under pressure], they wanted him to pay the money upfront.”

Gold

Other odd transactions were also starting to appear on CMS’s books.

In July 2021, Rudolf had set up a new company – Merxx International Africa – with two new business partners: a woman from Gauteng’s East Rand, Connie Martiens, and Tomas Sundell, a Swedish man with a Swiss bank account. 

Internal CMS records are vague about Merxx’s business, only referring to it as “besigheid gestig waarop hy sou goud handel” (business established to trade gold), and all our attempts to contact the two business partners failed. 

By 31 December 2021, CMS had loaned Merxx R1.8-million, according to internal management accounts that noted: “This loan is unsecured, interest free with no fixed terms of repayment”, meaning that CMS had no way of demanding the money back.

The timing was appalling. CMS was already desperately short of cash to allow it to complete its water and wastewater projects. In November 2021, staff hadn’t received their full salaries. 

But instead of clawing back the money he had loaned to Yasram Meat and Merxx, Rudolf gave the gold trading business another R4-million loan. By the end of February 2022, Rudolf had loaned Merxx R5.8-million – just as a cash flow crisis was about to engulf CMS. 

Rooiwal

It’s worth remembering that while Rudolf was investing in lamb and gold, the City of Tshwane was under the impression that CMS and NJR Projects (Edwin Sodi’s civil engineering firm) were hard at work on the Rooiwal wastewater treatment plant.

The deadline had been pushed out to May 2022, but it was becoming increasingly clear that the two tenderpreneurs were never going to meet it. 

We covered the debacle that followed in our Part 1: the life and death of a tenderpreneur, but to recap: in December 2021, a critical piece of equipment for the Rooiwal project – a dewatering belt press – arrived in Durban harbour.

CMS still owed €500 000 (roughly R10-million) to the supplier in Germany and the cost to keep the belt press in storage was racking up at R18 000 a day. 

In January 2022, the City had threatened to cancel the contract because no one had returned to site after the builders’ holiday.

Crews had finally returned to site on the final day of the deadline, but by March 2022, the City was threatening to cancel the contract again, unless CMS submitted a decent recovery plan.

In May, with no sign of the belt press, the consulting engineers told the City: “We have requested the Contractor to provide a full statement as to how much is still being owed, when they are paying and moving the equipment. They have misled everyone by saying that all the costs pertaining to the equipment clearances, tax, bill of lading and storage have been fully paid and delivery is confirmed.” 

Eventually, Sodi agreed to bail out CMS by depositing R4.7-million into the shipping agent’s account to pay for the storage fees so that the belt press could be released. But Rudolf had then asked the shipping agent if he could borrow some of the money to pay salaries, promising to return it a week later.

When that didn’t happen, Sodi opened a case of fraud with police and had Rudolf arrested. 

In August 2022, the City of Tshwane pulled the plug on the entire project. Rooiwal was not the first domino to fall but at R291-million it was the biggest.

Nowhere left to run

CMS Water might have been able to withstand the body blow of Rooiwal if 2022 had been less brutal.

In the course of seven months, CMS Water had lost nine contracts in quick succession:

• In March 2022, the Sannieshof contract was cancelled,
• In May 2022, the Parys contract was cancelled,
• In June 2022, the two Zeerust contracts were cancelled,
• In July 2022, the Mmabatho contract was cancelled,
• In August 2022, the Khutsong and Rooiwal contracts were cancelled and the Sterkfontein contract was ceded.
• In September 2022, the Ikageng contract was cancelled. 

Most of these cancelled sites had the hallmarks of CMS left all over them: advance payments with money unaccounted for, equipment never delivered or connected, delays exacerbated by shortfalls in payments to staff, and residents left in the lurch with no water.

Rudolf’s home turf, North West, had once been a shining beacon of what CMS Water could accomplish. Now, however, even that couldn’t be salvaged.

In September 2022, CMS Water lost one of its last remaining contracts in the JB Marks local municipality, which includes Potchefstroom where Rudolf had lived for years with his family.

In a series of letters, the municipality had begged CMS Water to hand over two generators for the Ikageng pump station, which had already been paid for.

“Our concern is not only with the lack of progress on the project but also with the resultant water supply shortages during times of scheduled load shedding,” acting municipal manager Sandile Tyatya wrote to Rudolf in July 2022. 

“The absence of standby power generation has directly resulted in numerous water supply shortages in the network, culminating into community unrest and service delivery protests … which blocked the N12 national road.

“We are also aware that your workers are still on site and have not been paid for long periods. This situation must be rectified as soon as possible.”

Tyatya signed off requesting “an urgent meeting with your good selves” to come up with a plan. However, when no recovery plan materialised, the project was cancelled two months later.

Mmabatho

In the province’s capital, Mahikeng, it was also dawning on Sedibeng Water that CMS probably wasn’t going to finish the upgrades to the Mmbatho water treatment works.

The R112-million contract had been awarded to CMS in February 2016. The project was supposed to supply another 10-million litres of drinking water to the city, but six years later it still wasn’t complete.

To secure the contract, CMS had partnered with Roucomm Systems, a construction company owned by Ralph Mabe, a prominent local businessman.

The rapper, Cassper Nyovest, who grew up in Mahikeng, once tweeted that Mabe was the first person he ever knew who drove a Bentley: “1st time I saw a Bentley I was 12/13 years old walking from my Hood to Rivera Park (The Burbs). I saw this big whip approaching from afar. Didn’t know the car but it just seemed expensive. A man called Ralf Mabe in a Green Flying Spur. Told myself I would drive the car one day!!”

When CMS Water needed a partner in Mahikeng, it turned to Mabe. But soon, there were problems.

“CMS began falling behind their submitted programme of works within six months … and were served numerous notices to comply,” David Magae of Magalies Water, which is now in charge of the project, told us.

Part of the problem was that the civil works – awarded to another company – were late, causing knock-on delays. But Magae added that there were also “numerous instances where the progress reported by CMS/Roucomm JV was disputed”. 

The November 2019 deadline came and went without the project being finalised. As the project floundered, taps in parts of Mahikeng ran dry and the quality of the water deteriorated. 

Eventually, the Mmabatho project ground to a halt. Bill Bosman, the consulting engineer on the project would later tell CMS’s liquidators: “We can’t say for sure why they didn’t complete it – they just stopped performing, after a very slow start, and never got going again despite all [the] cajoling and warnings.” 

Damages

By the time the R112-million Mmabatho contract was cancelled in July 2022, the CMS/Roucomm JV had already been paid R64-million – just over half the value of the original contract.

Magalies Water, which was tasked with rescuing the project, estimates that it will cost another R227-million to complete – and has instructed its lawyers to pursue CMS Water and Roucomm for damages. 

“[T]he total costs of damages that Magalies Water will be entitled to claim against the JV will only be known once the current contract is completed,” Magae explained.

But Mabe – Rudolf’s partner with the green Bentley – now claims he knew nothing about the Mmabatho project. 

When we spoke to him last year, he told us that while he had partnered with Dolf Schoeman, Rudolf’s father and CMS’s founder on a project back in the 1980s, he had never agreed to work with Rudolf: “The son, he’s a piece of nonsense, from what I’ve heard. I’ve never partnered with him,” he said.

To be clear, the documents we’ve seen and the public announcements all refer to the Mmabatho project as a CMS/Roucomm joint venture. But Mabe now claims he was the victim of a scam:

“I suspect that at some stage there was a project that this fellow [Rudolf] was wanting to do with us and then we gave him our particulars … I suspect he used our particulars for something else,” he told us in a follow-up call.  

In 2023, Mabe was arrested by the Hawks and charged with fraud over an R86-million tender to supply hospital equipment to the Moses Kotane hospital in Ledig, near Sun City. So the last thing he needs is to be saddled with a massive claim from Magalies Water as well.

Towards the end of the call, he added: “I believe he was a fucking piece of shit this fellow [Rudolf]. I believe he got killed because of nonsense like this.”

Fighting for the last rand

By the end of 2022, at least R1-billion in contracts would be cancelled or ceded to other companies to complete.

As projects started to collapse, a bank run began on the little bit of money left in CMS’s accounts.

In May 2022, FNB – which had banked CMS for over 20 years – called in its R6-million overdraft. Rudolf initially promised FNB that all CMS’s income would be paid into the now-frozen FNB account, then quietly informed the few clients who remained that CMS would be banking with Investec instead.

Dolf had seemingly tried a similar tactic: a month earlier, a letter from CMS had arrived at Maquassi Hills Local Municipality where it had a R4-million contract: “Kindly take note that in future … [CMS] will conduct services under the following name: Services for Water and Sanitation (PTY) Ltd”, the letter read, providing bank details for a new FNB bank account. 

A second letter arrived at the municipality a month later, sent this time by Rudolf: claiming that his father’s earlier letter had been sent “fraudulently” by someone “who is not employed or associated with CMS Water in any way”.

“We wish to furthermore inform you that Mr Schoeman senior is not part of CMS Water Engineering anymore as he decided to open a new business to compete with CMS Water Engineering directly,” Rudolf wrote.

Dolf, it seems, had seen the writing on the wall and while his son was slowly sinking by himself in Johannesburg, had begun creating a contingency plan. 

Services for Water and Sanitation was registered in March 2022, and although Dolf was not a director, he began transferring assets – vehicles and equipment – from CMS Water to the new company.

Rudolf’s letter to Maquassi Hills added: “Mr [Dolf] Schoeman does still have shares in the business but he is in the process of being removed. Therefore, he does not form part of any decision making and management of the business anymore.”

With that, CMS Water was left solely in the hands of Rudolf to manage.

One more trick

By now, salaries were going unpaid: “Families of the people working on site called me to say, ‘my child is sick, I haven’t been paid’. We didn’t have any answers,” the first former employee we spoke to told us.

“At the end, a lot of us took our own money just to try to keep the company [going] because Rudolf was nowhere,” they added.

By July 2022, most of the employees had been retrenched, but not paid their exit packages, which collectively amounted to R3.2-million. The handful who remained had seen Rudolf turn things around enough times to not abandon ship just yet.

And true to form, Rudolf had one more trick up his sleeve.

He had just secured an even bigger tender from the one place that should have known better: the national Department of Water and Sanitation.

That’s in the fifth and final part of our Deadly Water series: a zombie in the water industry.

Want to hear from the journalists behind the investigation? Listen to our DEADLY WATER podcast, available on Spotify, Soundcloud or on the amaBhungane website. Or sign up to our newsletter and get each DEADLY WATER story and podcast delivered to your inbox.

The post DEADLY WATER (Part 4): The land of lamb and gold appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

Joburg

Rudolf Schoeman Jnr took his father, Dolf’s, modest engineering business and – through bravado, ambition and alleged bribery – turned it into a major beneficiary of government tenders in the water industry.

In 2022, he boasted that it was “virtually impossible” for a company “with an order book of over R2-billion” to go bust.

Six months later though, he was dead, and CMS Water Engineering was in liquidation.

When we asked former employees where things went wrong, they pointed to two dates: 2017, when Rudolf got a new business partner, and 2019, when Rudolf moved to Joburg and allegedly descended into a haze of drugs and alcohol.

“[H]e said that most of his meetings are in Joburg… He wants to move there closer to the people, to the decision-makers,” a former employee told us.

Being in Joburg also meant being closer to his new partner, the politically-connected businessman Edwin Sodi. But as his focus shifted to Joburg, CMS Water’s existing contracts began to falter.  

“When Rudolf moved to Bryanston that was the biggest downfall because at least when he stayed in Potch, he used to come in two times a week, three times a week,” a second employee told us.

Rudolf, who wasn’t a hand-off boss to begin with, stopped coming into the office and was no longer available for meetings.

“[There’s] an old saying in Afrikaans: Ver van jou goed, naby jou skade,” the second employee told us.

It’s an idiom, so the translation – far from your things, close to your damages – doesn’t really convey the message. Essentially it means, if you stray too far from home and don’t take care of business yourself, you’re looking for trouble.

And as Rudolf moved to Joburg, trouble descended on CMS.

Deadly Water is also being released as amaBhungane’s first podcast, featuring interviews with the journalists who did the digging. Read all our investigations or listen to the podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud or at amaBhungane.org.

A fractured CMS

The breakup of CMS started small.

Clint Adonis had joined the family business after marrying Rudolf’s sister. Their wedding gift, he told us, was a 60% stake in CMS Water.

The potential perks of this arrangement were that Adonis would earn a salary from the company, while also giving CMS Water the B-BBEE status to allow them to qualify for a new set of tenders.

“I was only there on paper, I never had access to anything and I still don’t,” Adonis told amaBhungane last year.

This arrangement worked well for a decade until Adonis separated from his wife. In September 2019, he sent an email to both Rudolf (his brother-in-law) and Dolf (his father-in-law), indicating his “decision to withdraw from the organisation” and sell his stake in the business.

This was accepted by the Schoemans, but the negotiations over Adonis’ exit package became ugly.

In a letter, seen by amaBhungane, Dolf said he was not prepared to buy-out Adonis but would offer him R100 000 monthly for a year and give him ownership of his company vehicle, a Nissan Navara.

R1.2-million and a second-hand bakkie was a low-ball offer for 60% of a company with a turnover of R146-million. But Dolf warned that since CMS Water was a closed corporation, Adonis could only sell his shares “with the consent of every other member”, meaning they could block any attempt to sell his shares to another buyer.

From this point, things deteriorated: CMS Water stopped paying Adonis’s salary; in a letter Dolf told his soon to be ex-son-in-law that he had “not made a single contribution to the business”. 

In response, Adonis revoked his power of attorney and refused to sign a guarantee that CMS Water urgently needed for the biggest project it had ever secured: the R291-million expansion of the Rooiwal wastewater treatment works near Hammanskraal.

“You are willfully and blatantly trying to cripple the running of this business,” Rudolf wrote in an email on 25 November 2019, just days before CMS had to deliver the guarantee. “You clearly have one goal and that is to destroy the business.”

In another email later the same evening, Rudolf accused his (soon to be ex) brother-in-law of “hold[ing] the company at ransom which is arguably one of the most destructive and malicious forms of behaviour one could imagine”. 

“In light of the above mentioned, we are left with no other option but to proceed with further legal action … We just wish that you comprehended that you’re in essence gambling with the lives of over 500 employees which all have extended families. We find your gross disregard for this aspect shocking and disturbing.” 

But the letters also suggest that Adonis didn’t have access to CMS Water’s financials, despite being its majority shareholder. 

When speaking with amaBhungane last year, he told us he also hadn’t received his share of the R48-million in dividends paid out between 2014 and 2018: “For me, there’s a big stink around the company which I’m aware of but I don’t know what the stink is exactly, I couldn’t tell you. But it’s just a black hole for me.”

Timing

It’s worth pausing for a moment to point out how incredibly reckless the timing was. CMS Water had just landed the R291-million Rooiwal contract, and the Schoemans chose this moment to go to war with their majority shareholder.

The City of Tshwane, meanwhile, was getting nervous. On paper, CMS Water and Sodi’s company, NJR Projects, had looked like a sure bet. But where was the guarantee for the Rooiwal project?

Companies are required to put up a performance guarantee before undertaking any major government contract. They’re not cheap: the joint venture had to pay R2.7-million as a security deposit and monthly fees of R161 000.

But this was a R291-million contract, and if CMS Water and NJR couldn’t come up with 1% of the contract value upfront, how likely was it that they would complete the project?

The guarantee would eventually arrive two weeks late, after the Schoemans got a court order against Adonis. To explain the delay, CMS sent the city a signed board resolution removing Adonis from the company and accusing him of, amongst other things, “being incapacitated at work”.

The Schoemans didn’t remove Adonis though. B-BBEE certificates show that CMS Water continued to claim it was majority black-owned until it was liquidated.

The fallout with Adonis had almost cost CMS the R291-million Rooiwal contract, but CMS had gone to court and at the eleventh hour had delivered the guarantee for Rooiwal.

This wasn’t the first attempt to kill the Rooiwal contract, nor the last.

A few months earlier, a rival bidder had taken the municipality to court in a bid to block the award to CMS Water and NJR. That case failed, but a within weeks of the guarantee being delivered, the municipality tried to cancel the contract as well.

But again, CMS went to court and forced the municipality to reinstate the contract.

What the City had no way of knowing, though, is that another nuclear bomb was about to go off inside CMS Water.

The next domino to fall was CMS Global Solutions and business partner Eric du Plessis.

Fallout in Zeerust

In 2017, Rudolf had set up a new CMS. The plan was to leverage CMS Water’s B-BEEE status and superior track record to secure large and lucrative tenders in CMS Water’s name, then quietly redirect most of the money, and responsibility, to CMS Global, a company that Rudolf and Du Plessis jointly owned.

The arrangement had short-term benefits for Rudolf but would end up cannibalising the company his father had built.

The former employee told us they had raised concerns about the arrangement but Rudolf had shot them down: “We went to Rudolf and said, ‘Listen, stuff is going sideways … something’s not right.’ And he was livid… He said we didn’t trust him, and his gut instincts about people.”

But in June 2020, something changed, and Rudolf abruptly resigned from CMS Global.

“I don’t know what happened, but the relationship just went sour from his side,” Du Plessis told amaBhungane last year. “He wouldn’t take calls, wouldn’t talk to me.”

Letters, included in court papers, show that Rudolf had started to suspect that his partner was stealing money behind his back.

For three years, CMS Water had happily handed over millions to CMS Global. Now Rudolf became convinced that money had gone missing.

Money unaccounted for

In 2019, CMS Water had landed a R129-million project to upgrade the wastewater treatment plant in Zeerust, a major farming town in North West.

The plant was already operating over capacity when CMS Water was appointed, meaning that sewage was already leaking into the Kareespruit river. 

The expansion should have been completed in October 2020 but by June, consulting engineers Zutari were worried: “We are concerned about the contractors’ rate of progress since there is already delays,” it wrote in a letter to CMS Water, referring to its weekly letters outlining various shortcomings on the project, including “lack of sufficient foremen” and “broken equipment not being repaired”.

A month later, the consulting engineers sent another letter. For the second month in a row, [CMS] workers had been paid late and walked off the site: “Works are continuing to fall behind… A common theme is that there remains … a shortage of material and equipment on site for works to proceed… As we have discussed so many times, this really cannot carry on like this…”

What the consulting engineers didn’t realise was that there had been a massive fallout between Rudolf and Du Plessis, who were now accusing each other of stealing money from the Zeerust project.

As with most of its projects, CMS Water had asked the municipality for an upfront payment on Zeerust – first R12-million, then another R6-million. And as in most other cases, CMS Water transferred most of the money to CMS Global.

The second payment of R6-million was supposed to be used to pay a specific list of suppliers who would provide pipes, bricks and cement. But when Rudolf took a closer look at the finances, it appeared that the suppliers had received less than R300 000, leaving R5.7-million seemingly unaccounted for.

“Despite receiving this staggering amount, CMS Global Solutions still failed to adequately acquire materials for the project to be executed smoothly,” Rudolf wrote in an August 2020 letter, giving Du Plessis 24 hours to deliver evidence to the contrary or face legal action.

Du Plessis denied that any money was unaccounted for. But the problem wasn’t just Zeerust.

• In Rustenburg, CMS had faced similar accusations that R26-million in advanced payments couldn’t be accounted for. Read Deadly Water: Another Rooiwal debacle in Rustenburg.

Sodi’s projects

Court records show that CMS Global was working on 13 projects that had been awarded to CMS Water, including a R67-million project to upgrade a water pipeline in Ntambanana in Kwazulu-Natal, and a R112-million project to expand the Sterkfontein regional water treatment plant in the Free State.

On paper, both projects had been awarded to joint ventures (JVs) between CMS Water and NJR Projects, the civil construction company owned by Sodi. But in reality, both were being run by CMS Global.

“The circumstances surrounding the award of [the Ntmabanana] tender is still unclear to us as we carried absolutely no knowledge of the award of this tender ever being priced or tendered on by CMS Water Engineering or its JV partner,” Rudolf would later tell the North West high court. “It came as a surprise when we were furnished with the appointment letter … as no representatives from either of the JV partners were ever aware of this project.”

“After CMS Global [had] once again failed dismally, on this project, we were issued with another notice of termination,” he added.

Du Plessis disputed this, telling the liquidators that he and Rudolf “drank several bottles of champagne when the project was awarded”, but that, like Zeerust, the Ntambanana project became a casualty in the break-up.

Tenderpreneur Edwin Sodi partnered with CMS Water Engineering on half a billion rand’s worth of projects. In the end, even Sodi would charge CMS boss Rudolf Schoeman Jnr with fraud. (Photos: Mlungisi Louw / Netwerk24, Facebook, Canva)

The R112-million Sterkfontein project in the Free State was going off the rails as well: Sedibeng Water (the water board that awarded the tender) had given the joint venture R8-million in advance payments, but Rudolf now alleged that R6-million was unaccounted for.

Again, Du Plessis disputed this and, in a joint meeting with Sodi, “pointed out payments on the project’s spreadsheet of funds taken by [Rudolf]”.

“The reaction of Mr. Edwin Sodi clearly indicated that he had no knowledge of these funds and this led to an awkward situation in the meeting,” Du Plessis later told the liquidators.

CMS Global had even started work on the prized Rooiwal project. But had only completed R1.75-million worth of work when the fall out happened. 

Childish acts of sabotage

In an August 2020 letter, Du Plessis warned that Rudolf’s decision to stop paying CMS Global was jeopardising all their joint projects: “The ability to execute projects is critically dependent on cash flows to the contractor… For the past 3 months CMS Global Solutions was not able to pay its salaries and wages on time, causing labour unrest, risk to property and equipment.”

Part of the problem was that the opaque relationship between the two CMSes – which had helped CMS Global secure the contracts – was now a liability.

As Du Plessis pointed out: “Presumably, the purpose of your letter is to suggest that the funds for the project are spent inappropriately, which we deny… if you want to put us on terms for performance in terms of the … contract … it would be a requirement for such a contract to be in place, which we have been pleading for all along.

“The loose ‘verbal arrangement’ between the companies, which is partly your creation as a director of both companies is … not practical or suitable to regulate matters relating to contractual performance.”

Even so, Du Plessis pleaded to “resolve these matters amicably”. 

Rudolf’s response was vitriolic: CMS Global was guilty of “childish acts of sabotage” and had “a long-standing history of not paying its creditors”, he wrote back, ignoring the fact that until three months earlier he had been an owner and director of the company. 

“It has become evident that it is impossible for the two entities [CMS Water and CMS Global] to co-exist.”

In November 2020, Rudolf told Du Plessis to stop work on all CMS projects.

The devastating aftermath

What made the fallout at Zeerust so catastrophic was that parts of the old wastewater plant were dismantled ahead of CMS’s upgrade, which never came.

When amaBhungane visited the town in 2023, the plant was still in a half-completed state, with bacteria-ridden, contaminated water still flowing into the Klein Marico river and Klein Maricopoort dam.

The knock-on effect was regular blooms of blue-green algae, which can be toxic to people and potentially lethal for wildlife. The algae had given the Klein Maricopoort dam a neon green hue and made the water unsafe for farms to use for irrigation.

As an added bonus, the smell of sewage permeated the entire town of Zeerust.

Zeerust in North West is one of the towns that paid the price for CMS Water’s ambition. (Photos: Magnificent Mndebele / Cornel Dreyer)

Cornel Dreyer, a DA councillor, had kept close tabs on the Zeerust project using his drone to monitor CMS’s progress and the spreading environmental catastrophe. In one of many open letters, he accused the municipality of allowing “lethargic progress by a contractor already under terms, to contaminate waterways, downstream boreholes & irrigation schemes threatening the livelihood of residents”.

Asked why it had waited so long to cancel CMS Water’s contracts, the municipality said: “[R]emember before we could terminate, we were supposed [to] exhaust all internal remedies as well as consideration of the legal costs and lengthy litigations.”

In September last year, the municipality told Parliament that it needs another R105-million to complete the Zeerust project.

Hoendervleis

As the once-lucrative partnership disintegrated, chaos descended on both sides of CMS: Rudolf accused CMS Global of misappropriating funds on multiple projects, while Du Plessis claimed CMS Water was withholding millions in outstanding payments. 

As the two went back and forth over who was to blame, projects ground to a halt, including one near Richards Bay.

“Ek kry hoendervleis as ek aan daai projek dink … Daai projek het gemaak dat ek al my respek vir Eric verloor het,” a long-time staff member told the liquidators. (I get goosebumps when I think about that project … That project made me lose all my respect for Eric.)

Rudolf had stopped all payments to CMS Global and, in November 2020, had kicked Du Plessis off the Richards Bay site. With no money coming into CMS Global, its bank was now demanding that the equipment it had financed be returned.

But when staff arrived to collect equipment from the project, they were taken hostage.

According to the staff member, CMS Global failed to pay the local security company guarding the site: “Toe sê hulle ‘nee, ons hou julle en die trok hier tot hulle ons betaal en as hulle ons nie betaal nie, dan steek ons vir julle en die trek aan die brand.’” (“Then they said ‘no, we will keep you and the truck here until they pay us, and if they don’t pay us, then we’ll set you and the truck on fire.’”)

The staff member said they called Du Plessis and begged him to intervene – “To sê ek vir Eric, ‘maar praat met die mense, dis jou mense, onderhandel, doen iets,’” – but he refused, saying: “Ek gee nie geld nie.” (“Then I told Eric, but talk to the people, it’s your people, negotiate, do something,” but he refused saying: “I’m not giving money.”)

Finally, around midnight, another staff member managed to negotiate a deal: the hostages would be allowed to leave, but the truck would stay as collateral for the unpaid salaries. 

Du Plessis remembers the incident differently: “My recollection is that the security company guarding the equipment was not paid, I informed Rudolf beforehand that they will be reluctant to oversee the removal of equipment if their invoice remained unpaid,” he told us in a written response.

“[His] response was ‘f… them, I will take the [equipment]’. One can accept that the security company was approached with this attitude, and they refused.”

Rudolf, Du Plessis recalled, eventually relented and paid the security company what they were owed.

One CMS goes down

In June 2021, with no prospect of being rescued, CMS Global went into liquidation. And for a while, it looked like Rudolf had won.

Normally, the departure of a subcontractor isn’t terminal to a project. But on some of its biggest projects, CMS Water had handed over most of the responsibility and most of the money to CMS Global.

Worse still, CMS Water had asked for and received advanced payments on several of these projects. Now disagreements arose over how that money had been spent.

When we spoke to Du Plessis last year, we asked him why, in his view, CMS Water didn’t finish the projects that Global handed back.

“It was incompetence and arrogance,” he told us. “These projects are very complex… I am sure they did not plan to make the projects fail, they were overwhelmed by the technical requirements… There is no doubt in my mind that if CMS Water had honoured all the payments due to Global as the subcontractor these projects would have been completed.”

“The biggest thing of CMS [Global] closing down was with all the cash withdrawals,” a third employee told us. “[When you] pay this one and pay that one, and not the creditors, you cannot buy any equipment anymore because you’ve got a bad name.”

For a while, CMS Water was able to keep the plates spinning, moving money from site to site. In February 2021, the company even finalised its books showing R128-million in revenue for the year.

On paper, CMS Water still looked healthy. But in reality, both the company and Rudolf were already unravelling.

That’s in part 4 of Deadly Water: the land of lamb and gold.

Want to hear the story told by the journalists who did the digging? Listen to our DEADLY WATER podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud or at amaBhungane.org. Or sign up to our newsletter and get each DEADLY WATER article and podcast delivered to your inbox.

The post DEADLY WATER (Part 3): The dominoes fall appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

The project was supposed to double the capacity of the plant that supplies 500 000 residents with drinking water. But seven years, the project remains incomplete.

When amaBhungane visited the plant last year, the only sign of the project we found was a blue shipping container, sitting outside the plant, with a faded sign on the front, emblazoned with “CMS Water Engineering”.

The reason we went back to Rustenburg is that several sources in the water industry told us that what happened with the Rooiwal wastewater treatment plant outside Hammanskraal wasn’t a surprise. 

In 2019, the City of Tshwane awarded a R291-million contract to CMS Water and NJR Projects, a civil engineering firm owned by so-called tenderpreneur Edwin Sodi. The project was to carry out critical repairs to the Rooiwal wastewater treatment plant, but three years later, the City cancelled the half-completed project.

Sodi has largely been blamed for the failure of the Rooiwal project, and the City is in the process of blacklisting Sodi and his companies from government contracts.  

What we found when we visited Rustenburg was a project that predates Sodi but with all the hallmarks of the Rooiwal debacle.

“Sabotage tactic”

Rustenburg is an oddity in that water infrastructure projects are awarded not by the municipality, but by the Rustenburg Water Services Trust, which includes the engineering firm, Bigen Africa, as a trustee. 

When it came time to award the lucrative Bospoort contract, the municipality had a change of heart: the Trust, it decided, was “not well capacitated with personnel and requisite committees [for] the processing and awarding of tenders”. 

Instead, the municipality would run the tender itself, although Bigen would remain the consulting engineers who would oversee the work. 

But within weeks of CMS being awarded the R85-million contract, the Trust told Bigen to stop its oversight work on the project.

The municipality was furious. In a February 2018 “progress report” it claimed that Bigen’s decision to stop work was “a sabotage tactic” aimed at destabilising the project “and service delivery in general”.

It didn’t take long for a different story to emerge.

“Grossly non-compliant”

As was the case with Rooiwal, CMS Water’s bid for the Bospoort contract had risen to the top of the pile after all the other bidders were eliminated for technical reasons.

But when the project’s consulting engineer, Ian Pollard from Bigen, looked at CMS Water’s bid, he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been eliminated as well.

CMS Water’s bid was, in Pollard’s view, “grossly non-compliant”. There was more than one example, he noted in his report to the bid adjudication committee, of “a material and serious deviation” that was “justifiable grounds to disqualify this tender”. 

“In [my] view … the offered price is too high for the envisaged works, does not constitute a value for money proposition … and may be construed as fruitless and wasteful expenditure,” he warned. “[A]warding the contract to CMS Water Engineering is not supported and it is recommended that this tender be disqualified based on technical non-compliance.”

Undeterred, the three members of the bid adjudication committee scored CMS Water’s bid 93 points out of 100 for technical compliance and recommended that it be awarded the contract.

When a subsequent committee – tasked with awarding the contract – asked about Pollard’s report, the head of supply chain, Sam Makhura, allegedly told them that it had confirmed that the contract could go to CMS.

“[CMS Water] should have been disqualified during the initial evaluation phase,” Rustenburg’s municipal manager Sello Makona wrote in a later court filing. “The contents and conclusions of Mr. Pollard’s report were accordingly misrepresented … in an unscrupulous and completely unjustifiable fashion.”

Makhura remembers it differently. Over tea in Hartbeesfontein he told us: “[Pollard’s] report, it’s a recommendation by an external technical person, the municipality must then apply its discretion … And in this case, that’s exactly what happened.”

Makhura explained that a second technical expert had reviewed CMS Water’s bid and given it the okay. Based on this report – which is not included in the court papers – the committee recommended that CMS Water be awarded the contract.

He added: “I just don’t appreciate the fact that he [Pollard] is making himself to be the Jesus of the process.”

At R115-million, CMS’ bid was one of the more expensive. To keep the project within the R85-million budget, the municipality simply reduced the scope of work that CMS Water would be required to deliver. 

Within days of the contract being signed, the Rustenburg municipality began making payments.

R26-million richer

In fact, CMS Water had waited just six days after signing the Bospoort contract to issue its first invoice of R17.5-million. A month later, it sent another invoice for R7-million.

Rudolf later explained that the municipality was desperate to start the project and spend its budget before the end of the year so agreed to give CMS Water advance payments to buy equipment. 

National Treasury only allows municipalities to make advance payments in exceptional circumstances because of the obvious risk that suppliers will take the money and not deliver the goods.

But when another technical expert from Bigen reviewed the equipment CMS Water had bought, they discovered problems: “some components were of the wrong specification and not suitable for … the project”, they told the municipality. 

CMS Water had also presented “incomplete raw materials” while claiming for finished products, and in some cases, couldn’t prove it had paid suppliers and taken legal ownership of the goods, they wrote. 

Out of the R19-million in equipment CMS Water claimed to have bought, only R3.4-million could be verified with absolute certainty, they said. 

The municipality, which had initially defended the decision to award the contract to CMS Water, now conceded that the consulting engineers were right to raise red flags.

“The extent, usability, ownership, suitability and value of the equipment that [CMS Water] claims to have purchased using the funds of the [municipality] is the subject of serious doubt,” Makona, Rustenburg’s municipal manager, would tell the Mahikeng court in 2021 in a bid to have the Bospoort contract set aside.

CMS Water disputed that any money had been misspent. In an affidavit, Rudolf said that CMS Water had provided paperwork to justify the millions it had already spent on equipment, which the technical experts had ignored.

Instead, much like he had done at Rooiwal, Rudolf claimed that sinister forces were colluding against CMS: “Bigen Africa was in a preferential position, in effective control of the relevant water works and in essence had a monopoly,” Rudolf wrote.

It was clear, he added, that “the preferential position of … Bigen Africa was threatened”, that there were “attempts to thwart the award made to CMS”.

The Trust dismissed Rudolf’s conspiracy claims, calling them “hearsay and speculation” in court papers. When we spoke to the Trust last year it said that CMS Water’s appointment was, in its view, “unlawful and irregular”, which is why it had refused to work on the project.

The suggestion that this amounted to sabotage was “untruthful, factually incorrect, and malicious”, it added.

Channelling the money

What Rustenburg municipality had no way of knowing was that CMS Water had entered into a secret agreement to hand over most of the responsibility – and most of the money – to another company.

In 2017, Rudolf had set up CMS Global Solutions, ostensibly as a civil engineering arm of his father’s company. The new company, however, was not a division of CMS Water but owned 50% by Rudolf and 50% by a new business partner, Eric du Plessis.

As one former employee put it: “Eric and Rudolf presented as a front to people, it was only inside that we knew the split.”

• Want more backstory? Read Deadly Water: a trail of destruction across North West

The agreement was that CMS Water would secure civil engineering contracts – using its B-BBEE scorecard and grade 8 PE rating from Construction Industry Development Board (CIBD) – then pass most of the work on to CMS Global Solutions.

According to Jan Brink, a private investigator hired by CMS Global’s liquidators, “it was agreed that the funds of CMS Global would be channelled through CMS Water”.

So when the Rustenburg municipality transferred the advance payment of R26 104 047 to CMS Water, for Rudolf to buy equipment, Rudolf had instead transferred R25 104 047 to CMS Global, keeping just R1-million in CMS Water.

This was not a civil engineering contract, but a mechanical and electrical one, and Du Plessis, Rudolf’s erstwhile business partner, openly admits that CMS Global had no expertise in this field. 

Despite this, records show that he was deeply involved in the project, renegotiating the scope of work with the municipality, and preparing payment certificates to facilitate the R26-milllion advance.

As for the consultants’ claim that they could only find R3.4-million in value? Du Plessis maintains that the true value of the equipment was likely much higher.

“This estimate provided is very low since two of the items Rudolf instructed us to purchased namely, filter floors and filter media amounted [to] more than R3.4-million,” he told us, but added that CMS Global had relied on Rudolf’s expertise and as a mere subcontractor “CMS Global bears zero responsibility for the failure” of the Bospoort project.

System failures

In April 2019, the Auditor-General advised Rustenburg to cancel CMS Water’s contract and open a case with the Hawks. 

The audit had found several irregularities with the tender, including the scope of the project being reduced with no explanation, and possible fraud in CMS Water’s invoices that saw the municipality seemingly paying for material that hadn’t been purchased.

Only two months later, the City of Tshwane decided to appoint CMS Water to fix the Rooiwal wastewater treatment plant, in remarkably similar circumstances.

As with the Bospoort contract, CMS Water only won the Rooiwal contract after all the other bidders were eliminated on questionable grounds. On both projects, CMS Water would demand and receive massive upfront payments from the municipality. And like Bospoort, CMS Water would use the needs of the community as leverage to hang on to a contract it didn’t deserve in the first place and would ultimately never complete.

On paper, once the Rustenburg municipality knew there was a problem with the Bospoort contract, it followed the right steps: it stopped all further payments to CMS Water, brought disciplinary charges against the officials who awarded the contract, appointed law firm ENS to conduct a forensic investigation, and reported its suspicions about the contract to the Hawks.

But then, the systems of accountability ground to a halt.

The municipality didn’t want to approach the court to have the contract set aside until the Hawks had completed their investigation: “A premature disclosing of the facts … could only compromise the criminal investigation… However, as time passed it became evident that the criminal investigation in this matter is not proceeding rapidly as the [municipality] trusted,” Makona, the municipal manager, later told the Mahikeng high court. 

Concerned that an “open-ended delay” would prejudice its case, the municipality only approached the court in November 2020 to have the Bospoort contract set aside, by which point CMS had already moved on to the Rooiwal contract.

The municipality then also discovered that the procurement files it needed for the case had “patently been interfered with and documents removed”.

CMS Water, which had already threatened to sue the municipality for damages, fought Rustenburg’s decision to cancel the contract. 

“There was a stage where the Bospoort people said to Rudolf, ‘Listen, we’ll pay you out X amount… Then just leave. Get out of our lives.’ And Rudolf says, ‘fuck you, we want the project because there’s more money to be made than you are willing to pay us out’,” a second former employee claimed. 

While the case wound its way through unhurried law enforcement and a creaking court system, CMS Water kept securing more tenders.

Meanwhile, Makhura – the official who used his discretion to recommend CMS Water be awarded the contract – had resigned from Rustenburg municipality before his disciplinary hearing, which included charges relating to the CMS Water tender.

He didn’t want to discuss the charges when we met him for tea but instead told us he felt pressured into resigning after a senior official called him to an informal meeting after work. “He says to me … Apparently, the Hawks are investigating a lot of things … and if I were you, I’d resign tomorrow morning. I’m advising you as a brother – resign.”

Makhura now works in the procurement department at Magalies Water.

This year, the municipality issued a new tender to complete the work that CMS Water started. But Rustenburg has little choice but to pay up yet again: “The upgrade of the Bospoort Water Treatment Plant … has encountered significant setbacks, primarily due to alleged corruption,” councillor Luan Snyder told the local Platinum Weekly newspaper last year. 

“This corruption has halted the project, which is a major factor in the broader water supply issues in Rustenburg … Without the additional … megalitres, Rustenburg will continue to face a water crisis.”

Advance payments and cash withdrawals

Unfazed by the Auditor-General’s report on Bospoort, Rudolf began demanding advance payments on most new contracts, including R71-million on the Rooiwal contract.

“[H]y het advance payments begin vat op meeste van sy goed en dan het hy òf nie die goed gelewer wat hy gesê het hy gaan nie òf net ‘n gedeelte daarvan gelewer en die res van die geld gebruik vir ander goed,” a long-time employee told the liquidators. (“He started taking advance payments on most of his stuff and then he either didn’t deliver the stuff he said he was going to, or only delivered part of it and used the rest of the money for other things.”)

“Ek het met Rudolf gepraat daaroor en toe sê ek vir hom, ‘jis, ons raak agter op ons projekte, ons cash flow raak min, ek weet nie waarheen gaan die geld nie,’” another employee added. (“I talked to Rudolf about it and then I told him ‘geez, we are falling behind on our projects, our cash flow is running low, I don’t know where does the money go?’”)

A report, compiled by CMS Global’s liquidators, would later conclude: “On the majority of the projects, advance payments were paid out to CMS Water and the majority of this money was misappropriated by being utilised on other projects and personal expenses.”

Meanwhile, increasingly nervous employees were being roped into what they suspected was an ever-growing bribery scheme.

“At one stage, guys went to withdraw R200 000 cash and they were followed from the bank and robbed,” the first former employee told us.

After this, they say Rudolf switched to using a pay-day loans company in Klerksdorp to provide cash.

“[O]bviously betaal CMS al sy Range Rovers, sy huis in Bryanston … en sy groot huis in Potch en in Jeffreys. So hy kry al sy goed en hy kry ‘n salaris, maar ons moet kort-kort vir hom geld vat … tussen R10 000 en ek dink R700 000,” one of the employees told the liquidators. (“Obviously CMS pays for all his Range Rovers, his house in Bryanston … and his big house in Potch and in Jeffreys.  So he gets all his things and he gets a salary, but we have to take money to him every now and then … between R10,000 and I think R700,000.”)

As the second employee put it: “He’s my boss, it’s his money. What am I going to [say]? ‘No’? ‘Tell me why you’re taking the money’? No, it’s his money. I did as I was told, I didn’t know what the money was for, and I still don’t. You’ve obviously got suspicions. But if I went to the cops and said, ‘I’ve got suspicions’, what’s going to happen?”

The collapse

Up until 2019, there were at least 40 projects – collectively worth over R500-million – that CMS Water completed and handed over without any drama. But eventually, with Rudolf chasing bigger and bigger contracts, CMS Water’s bread-and-butter work began to suffer. 

“Rudolf was not a very hands-on boss,” the second employee told us. 

While CMS Water’s founder, Rudolf Schoeman Snr, was a permanent presence at the CMS Water office in Orkney, Rudolf, who lived an hour away in the Lekwena Wildlife Estate outside Potchefstroom, was rarely there. 

“I think at the beginning, I saw him maybe three times a week. By the end, I hadn’t seen him at the office for more than a year,” the second employee said. “And once he started living in Joburg, if he wanted to see us, we had to go there to his house, where he was murdered – I’m saying murdered, I don’t know, it’s my suspicion.”

• We started this series with the suspicious circumstances surrounding Rudolf’s death at his luxury townhouse in Bryanston: Deadly Water part 1: The life and death of a tenderpreneur.

Naby jou skade

While CMS Water’s eventual collapse apparently came as a shock to its clients — municipalities and water boards across four provinces — former employees told us they had been trying to sound the alarm for years, including with Dolf Schoeman, the company’s founder.

“We knew what was going on inside the company … and the number of times we went to Oom Dolf and said, ‘Shit’s happening now, you need to take charge, we are going downhill, something’s going wrong’ and it fell on deaf ears,” the second former employee told us.

“And it infuriates me because we saw this was coming, we warned everybody… and until now it baffles me that no journalist has ever come to the people that worked at CMS to discover the full story because there’s so much more behind it.”

But what was going on behind the scenes? And what caused a company with a 40-year track record and R2-billion in government contracts implode?

As one former employee put it: “[There’s] an old saying in Afrikaans: Ver van jou goed, naby jou skade.” (Far from your goods, close to your damages.)

Essentially it means, if you stray too far from home and don’t take care of business yourself, you’re looking for trouble. 

That’s in part 3 of Deadly Water: the dominoes fall. 
Want to hear the story told by the journalists who did the digging? Listen to our DEADLY WATER podcast on Spotify or Soundcloud. Or sign up to our newsletter and get each DEADLY WATER article and podcast delivered to your inbox.

The post DEADLY WATER (Part 2 continued): Another Rooiwal debacle in Rustenburg appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

It starts in 1984, in the gold mining town of Orkney, when Rudolf Schoeman Snr – who goes by “Dolf” – started a business repairing machinery and equipment for water and wastewater (sewage) treatment plants.

Initially, the company was little more than a one-man show, living off small contracts from North West municipalities. By 2000, it had grown to eight employees, but still its ambitions were modest.

“Oom Dolf wasn’t a luxury guy,” a long-time employee told us in 2023.

“[He] only got a touch screen phone a year ago, we’d always have to go buy him the Pep stuff,” another employee added.

But in 2012, Dolf’s son Rudolf – then a 30-year-old lawyer with outsized ambitions – asked if he could join the family business. 

• Read Part 1 of Deadly Water: The life and death of a tenderpreneur.

“At first I thought that he was a little bit unorthodox in the way that he did things. He liked to party… And he was a loud guy,” the second employee told us. “But then after adjusting to the loudness and the flashiness, I actually thought that he was a good businessman. He thought of stuff out of the box.”

The employee, who like others would only speak to us if we hid their identity, told us that Rudolf could also be volatile. If he arrived at the office in Orkney and no one was available to wash his car – a black Dodge RAM bakkie or his F-type Jaguar – he would scream, only half-jokingly, “So after everything I’ve done for you this is how you treat me? Jy voel fokol vir my!” (You feel fuck-all for me.)

Rudolf Schoeman passed away amid shards of glass in 2023 before we began our investigation, and Dolf Schoeman did not respond to our questions. Instead, we’ve pieced together a picture of the company’s speculator growth and subsequent implosion based on interviews with insiders, internal documents, and court records.

Small favours

By 2014, CMS Water had built up an impressive turnover of R68-million a year. But Rudolf wanted more, and it’s at this point that the little company from North West allegedly became a vehicle for something more sinister.

“The bribery started small: R3 000 here or R5 000 there… It was ‘But dad, if you pay this guy just a small amount, he will always look after you’,” the first employee told us. 

But as the contracts got bigger, so too, the employee alleged, did the payments: “If you gave in a payment certificate for R1.3-million, then that other person … will want 10 percent of that and they would just give it… The biggest amount that I drove with was R3-million.”

The payments that former employees describe didn’t leave a paper-trail, at least not in the records we’ve seen. Instead, what we found was evidence of Rudolf’s generosity towards officials from the water boards and municipalities where CMS had or hoped to land contracts.

This included a two-night stay at Sun City for an official in JB Marks local municipality, where CMS would later secure a R23-million contract to build a new pump station, as well as R3 000 worth of bricks for an “Oom David”.

Both Dolf and Rudolf were close to David Dikoko, the non-executive chairman of Sedibeng Water, a sprawling waterboard that supplied chunks of North West, Free State and Northern Cape.

In 2015, CMS landed a R65-million contract to repair the wastewater treatment plant in Wolmaranstad, 80km down the road from Orkney. CMS would later tell forensic investigators that it was approached by the project manager and asked to pay a 10% bribe. 

The Schoemans told investigators they refused but agreed to pay R5.1-million to a local company – picked by the municipality – that would source pumps for the project. The pumps were never delivered.

CMS had been bitten in Wolmaranstad but Sedibeng Water would become a lucrative hunting ground: in the space of six years, CMS landed nine contracts worth R396-million.  

Dikoko told us that he knew the Schoemans from his time as the mayor of Klerksdorp.

“When I was a mayor, the person that I knew was his father,” Dikoko told us during a meeting in Sandton last year. “So Rudolf was just a small boy and grew from that.”

Amongst the records, we found a proof of payment for R3 000, paid to SmartStone in Potchefstroom on behalf of “Oom David”. When we asked Dikoko about the payment, he explained that he asked Rudolf for help sourcing brick paving for his home.

“Instead of sending me the [details], he said … ‘I will buy you the [bricks] and send them to you, you will reimburse me.’ … That’s how it was done.”

Dikoko told us he repaid Rudolf in cash. Asked if he declared the transaction to Sedibeng Water, he said: “There’s nothing to declare because it’s not a gift. It was just a small thing.”

Now, it’s not like R3 000 worth of bricks bought CMS R396-million worth of contracts from Sedibeng Water, and as the non-executive chair, Dikoko role was to provide oversight not to award tenders.

But Rudolf seemed to believe that keeping powerful people on side had benefits.

A house in the suburbs

Two former employees told us that, in 2018, CMS Water began renovating a house belonging to an official in the Ngaka Modiri Molema District Municipality.

Cornel Dreyer, a councillor with the Democratic Alliance, told us he had seen CMS Water vehicles parked outside the house in question, and had seen CMS delivering construction materials on several occasions. 

Another former employee, who had allegedly installed air conditioners at the house, said they were told CMS Water’s involvement in the home improvement project was to open doors within the district municipality.

We asked the official who owned the house whether he had paid CMS for the alleged renovations. He ignored our questions. 

The municipality was equally disinterested. Essentially, they told us, this is “a private matter”. They simply had “no reason” to investigate the alleged upgrades to a senior employee’s home.

In 2019, roughly a year after the alleged home makeover began, CMS Water secured three contracts from the municipality to refurbish the Zeerust and Sannieshof wastewater treatment plants. 

Total value? R209-million.

CMS goes global

By 2017, CMS had almost doubled its revenue to R128-million, with big contracts in places like Parys, Kroonstad and Mahikeng. But Rudolf still wanted more, so in 2017, he unveiled a new civil engineering division: CMS Global Solutions.

“He got a partner who came in with a moerse bang… and then Rudolf’s whole way of doing business changed when the partner came in,” the second employee told us.

CMS Global was not, in fact, a division of CMS Water Engineering but an independent company owned 50% by Rudolf and 50% by a new business partner, Elias ‘Eric’ du Plessis.

This presented a problem: CMS Water’s long track-record had secured it a coveted grade 8 PE rating from the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB), meaning it qualified to bid for government’s most expensive tenders.

• The CIDB grading system goes from 1 to 9 based on the contracts a company has successfully completed in the past 5 years. Companies with a grade 1 can bid for construction projects of up to R500 000, whereas there is no limit on the size of the tenders for which a company with a grade 9 can compete. CMS Water Engineering had a grade 8, meaning it could bid for contracts of up to R200-million. However, because it was black-owned, it was given a status of “potentially emerging” (PE), meaning that it could bid for contracts one grade higher, allowing CMS to compete for tenders alongside companies like WBHO and Aveng.  

In addition to this, Clint Adonis, who was married to Rudolf’s sister Ilze, had been a 60% shareholder of CMS Water since 2009, meaning that under B-BBEE laws, CMS Water was considered majority black-owned.

CMS Global, with no track record and two white owners, had neither of these advantages. And so a plan was hatched: CMS Water would secure tenders for civil engineering work – using its track record and B-BBEE status – then quietly pass most of the work and money to CMS Global.

Jan Brink, a private investigator who was later hired by CMS Global’s liquidators to look into the relationship between the two CMSes, told the liquidators in a 45-page report: “There was no written agreement … When payments were received from a client, a small percentage, that was usually 10%, was kept back by CMS Water and the remainder of the invoice was then paid over to CMS Global.”

Included in Brink’s report is an unsigned Memorandum of Agreement spelling out that CMS Water would only be entitled to keep between 1% and 2.5% of any payment received from its clients, while the balance would be paid to CMS Global “sonder versuim” (without delay). 

At another point in the report, Brink wrote: “[T]he projects were tendered by utilising CMS Water, as agreed by Rudolf, but CMS Global attended to the contracts … it was agreed that the funds of CMS Global would be channelled through CMS Water.”

As the second former employee put it: “That was huge amounts of money to run through a company that you started literally a month or two ago. And it was a way of building up [CMS] Global and making it CIDB ready.”

To fudge the line between the two CMSes, CMS Global used a near identical logo and Du Plessis signed his emails “Director, Civils”. 

“Eric and Rudolf presented as a front to people, it was only inside that we knew the split,” they added.

Fronting?

At face value, this looks like fronting, which is a crime in terms of the B-BBEE Act and comes with a 10-year jail sentence and/or 10-year ban on receiving government contracts – although, as we’ll see, Du Plessis denies this, puts any blame on Rudolf and says he was merely a subcontractor.

In the long run the arrangement would also cannibalise CMS Water, but it had both short- and long-term benefits for Rudolf. 

In the short-term, he would get a larger slice on the profits: at CMS Water he was only a 20% shareholder, alongside his father (20%) and his brother-in-law (60%). At CMS Global, he would now be a 50% shareholder.

In the long-term, Rudolf allegedly planned to jump ship: “Rudolf and his dad didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of stuff … Rudolf’s dangerous way of doing stuff and pushing stuff to the limit, he and his dad fought about stuff like that a lot… Rudolf’s plan was always to leave CMS [Water] and just go to [CMS] Global with Eric,” the second former employee told us.

R600-million

Between September 2017 and April 2020, this is how CMS Water operated: on paper, the company was growing – in 2019, it recorded R146-million in revenue – but the tidy profits the company used to make shrank as more contracts were syphoned off to CMS Global.

In total, more than R600-million worth of critical infrastructure projects were passed to Rudolf’s other company:

• In 2017, the Rooigrond (R62-million) and Kroonstad (R10-million) wastewater treatment plants,
• In 2018, the Bospoort water treatment plant (R85-million), the Sediba irrigation system (R15-million) and the Vierfontein pipeline (R4-million),
• In 2019, the Sannieshof (R50-million) and Zeerust (R129-million) wastewater treatment plants, reticulation in Mkhwanazi (R35-million), and a substation in Alrode (R77-million), 
• And in 2020, the Sterkfontein water treatment plant (R112-million), drying beds in Khutsong (R14-million), and a pipeline and pump station for Ntambanana (R67-million).

Half of these projects were never completed, so it’s hard to know how much would have eventually landed in CMS Global’s bank account. But according to the payment reconciliations contained in court papers, CMS Water received R208-million from its clients on these projects and passed R174-million (84%) to CMS Global.

A special kind of subcontractor

For reasons we’ll get into later, the secret agreement didn’t last. And by the time we spoke to Du Plessis, he was keen to distance himself from Rudolf, CMS Water and any responsibility for the trail of destruction it left behind. 

He told us that he approached Dolf because he knew CMS was subcontracting all their civil engineering work and asked if they wanted to bring that in house.

CMS Global was merely “the primary civils subcontractor of choice”, he told us in a letter. He didn’t see the arrangement as fronting but added that whatever promises were made as part of the tender, that was on Rudolf and CMS Water. 

“No contract was subcontracted to [CMS] Global in its entirety … Global’s mandate was to do the civil construction work when required by CMS Water (Rudolf) to do so … Rudolf would evaluate the bill of quantities of a specific project and assign the scope of works to be performed,” he wrote.

That unsigned agreement, which had promised CMS Global up to 99% of CMS Water’s income, only applied to “the civils portion of contracts, not a percentage of the total contract value”, he added.

“CMS Global would be entitled to the value of work performed as allocated by 

CMS Water, minus the administration charge,” he told us.

Out of the R600-million in contracts that he worked on, Du Plessis estimates that only 50% would ultimately have flowed to CMS Global.

The luxury life

Rightly or wrongly, some former employees blame Du Plessis for the eventual collapse of CMS Water. 

“The biggest problem [was] when we became a civil company,” a third employee told us. “When we concentrated on mechanical and electrical, it was 100%. The moment when we became civil, when Eric du Plessis came in, that’s when –”

“– when the luxury life came in,” the first employee added.

Rudolf had always lived his life in excess. According to former employees, he was always decked out in designer clothes, from Versace and Polo shirts, to Alexander McQueen sneakers that cost R10 000 to a Romain Jerome Titanic-DNA watch worth R300 000. Even the candles that he bought for the CMS office in the industrial part of Orkney came from Ralph Lauren at R1 500 a pop.

“If Eric and Rudolf stood next to each other, you would say Eric was a boer and Rudolf was a city boy,” the second employee told us. 

But now, their joint company, CMS Global – flush with cash from CMS Water –began splashing out as well. 

In January 2019, CMS Global bought a Cessna plane for R3-million; in May, a 40ft yacht called “Happy Ours” for R1.7-million. The yacht, we’ve been told, was intended for Jeffreys Bay, where Rudolf had a holiday house, but turned out to be too big for the mooring. Instead, the yacht stayed in the V&A Waterfront, and Cape Town became a regular haunt.

Du Plessis denies that he was responsible for introducing a lavish streak to CMS and maintains that the plane and the yacht were sound business decisions: “The plane was purchased as a business tool to ferry project management to and from [Kwazulu-Natal]” while the yacht, he claimed, was a fixer-upper that was ultimately sold by the business rescue practitioners at a hefty profit.

“[T]he lifestyle followed by Rudolf being in and out of rehabilitation facilities, his impulsive and negative approach to situations and lavish taste for the expensive was more of a concern,” he told us. 

Yet one doesn’t need to travel far to see how the agreement with CMS Global contributed to the company’s downfall. 

In 2018, CMS Water was awarded an R85-million tender to upgrade the Bospoort water treatment plant, on the outskirts of Rustenburg. It was one of the first projects that would be diverted to CMS Global, and it was a disaster.

It would also set the standard for what would happen at Rooiwal: allegations of tender rigging, court battles, and abandoned projects. 

That’s when part 2 of Deadly Water continues.
Want to hear the story told by the journalists who did the digging? Listen to our DEADLY WATER podcast . Or sign up to our newsletter and get each DEADLY WATER article and podcast delivered to your inbox.

The post DEADLY WATER Part 2: A trail of destruction across North West appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

However, in the cold light of day, it became clear that while a party had been raging upstairs, something far darker had occurred downstairs.

Rudolf was found by one of his employees splayed on the ground surrounded by shattered glass. His face, we’ve been told, was streaked with lines of blood and slightly swollen in parts, suggesting that an altercation may have occurred.

Yet the official police report would say that Rudolf (40) had died of natural causes.

• Want to hear the story told by the journalists who did the digging? DEADLY WATER is also being released as amaBhungane’s first podcast. Listen here:

Cholera kills

Two months later, in the dusty streets of Hammanskraal, on the outskirts of Pretoria, people started getting sick with a terrifying disease that hadn’t been seen in South Africa for 14 years.

Cholera kills surprisingly quickly. Within hours, the bacteria– vibrio cholerae – hijacks your small intestine and it begins expelling astonishing amounts of water from the body as diarrhoea.

Victims can lose 10 to 20 litres of water a day. As extreme dehydration shuts down internal organs, some patients lapse into shock, coma and eventually death.

In February 2023, two sisters travelling from Malawi picked up cholera and brought it back to Joburg. By the end of the month, there were six confirmed cases and one death.

Even then, the outbreak was largely contained.

Until May, when it hit Hammanskraal and the number of cases exploded.

By August, there had been 1290 cases and 47 deaths. 

But what did the suspicious death of Rudolf Schoeman Jnr, a flashy Joburg businessman, have to do with the undignified and tragic death of people in Hammanskraal?

Two years ago, amaBhungane began digging.

What we found was that Rudolf and his company, CMS Water Engineering, had left a trail of destruction across four provinces: broken sewage plants, unpaid workers, and millions of people with dry taps or contaminated drinking water. (Note: we’ve used Rudolf’s first name throughout because his father, who founded CMS, is also Rudolf Schoeman.)

Buried in court papers and leaked company documents, we found evidence of BEE fronting, allegations of bribery, and strange investment schemes involving lamb and gold.

Even the prolific tenderpreneur Edwin Sodi – who partnered with Rudolf on R470-million worth of projects – would end up charging him with fraud.

Yet opinions on Rudolf and the business he built remain divided.

One former employee, who lost everything when CMS closed, told us: “I really wish you had met Rudolf before … I wish you had met the businessman that I came to know because that guy – jis – he would have taken us places. If that guy was still here today, I would still be working for CMS.”

A former business associate wasn’t so forgiving: “I believe he was a fucking piece of shit this fellow. I believe he got killed because of nonsense like this.”

Four years earlier

Joburg was a city that marked both the highest and lowest points of Rudolf’s life. It was where he kept his private plane, his wardrobe filled with designer clothes, and where he rubbed shoulders with the politically-connected people who could help him land government contracts.

Four years before his death, Rudolf’s company CMS Water Engineering had landed their biggest contract to date: a R291-million upgrade of the Rooiwal wastewater plant in Pretoria.

For over a decade, the Rooiwal plant had been dysfunctional, allowing raw sewage to flow directly through the works and into the Apies River. Some 20km downstream this river runs into the Leeukraal Dam, which is the primary source of raw water for half of Hammanskraal’s 400 000 residents.

On a good day, the Rooiwal plant can treat 110 million litres of sewage. But on an average day, Pretoria sends 150 million litres of waste in Rooiwal’s direction.

The City of Tshwane was first warned about this dire situation in 2004. Nothing happened. 

In 2011, with raw sewage pouring into the Apies, the water department declared the river a disaster area. In 2019, in an act of desperation, the minister asked the Pretoria high court to declare that the City of Tshwane – under DA control since 2016 – had failed to comply with its legal obligations to protect the environment.

The situation in Hammanskraal had become a “never-ending water crisis”, the Human Rights Commission would later say, with political parties offering “never-ending promises to residents”.

So, when the municipality announced, in October 2019, that it had appointed Rudolf’s company to fix part of the Rooiwal plant at a cost of R291-million, it felt like light at the end of a very long tunnel.

“The ‘fantastic’ Rooiwal tender that everybody’s talking about? The day we got the award for Rooiwal I said this tender is either going to make CMS or break CMS, because it’s the biggest one we’ve ever gotten,” the former employee told us. “And funny that ended up being the exact thing that sank us.”

Inside CMS

To secure the contract, CMS Water had partnered with NJR Projects, a civil engineering firm owned by Sodi. 

The deal was that CMS and two Sodi companies would form a joint venture (“JV”). CMS would handle the mechanical and electrical engineering work (for 40% of the contract value), while NJR and another Sodi company, Blackhead Consulting, would cover the rest. 

Sodi was well-connected but also tainted: six months earlier the book Gangster State revealed that Sodi’s company had landed a dubious R255-million contract to remove asbestos from buildings in the Free State.

That 2014 contract was awarded without a tender, the work had been outsourced at a fraction of the cost, yet R230-million was paid to Sodi and his business partner, Igo Mpambani. 

Amongst the evidence unearthed in Gangster State was a “cost of business” schedule which included R27-million in alleged bribes for five government officials, including then-premier Ace Magashule (an allegation for which both men are currently on trial).

In 2017, Mpambani was assassinated in broad daylight, while driving his Bentley through Sandton. But Sodi kept climbing.

In 2020, he openly told the State Capture Commission that he had lavished payments on politicians, including then-health minister Zweli Mkhize, then-deputy state security minister Zizi Kodwa, and current deputy president Paul Mashatile.

https://youtu.be/Ls6xrZx7GzQ

Rudolf wasn’t a political animal in the way Sodi was.

According to a former staff member, he occasionally donated to the ANC, but it appears that his biggest investment was in the personal relationships with people – from all political parties – that he thought could swing contracts his way. 

As the former employee told us: “He didn’t like the ANC because they were the ANC, he liked the ANC because they had power. He also had ties with EFF leaders and DA leaders… I remember a bachelor’s we went to in [Potchefstroom], he started buying drinks for local EFF leaders, saying ‘these are big tjommies of mine, they’re going to give us lots of work’.”

Outrage over Rooiwal

Almost immediately, there were questions about how CMS, NJR & Blackhead had secured the Rooiwal contract.

The bid evaluation report shows that there were eight companies vying for the contract; two – Aveng Grinaker-LTA and CSV Construction – were eliminated for failing to complete documents; another five bidders were eliminated during the technical evaluation phase.

This left just one compliant bid: Sodi and Rudolf’s bid at R291-million.

An investigation by the City of Tshwane, would later conclude that their bid should have been eliminated in the first round because Blackhead Consulting wasn’t registered with the Construction Industry Development Board (a requirement) and had asked for R10-million in professional fees (a no-go).

It added: “The scoring for relevant management experience was irregular in that certain points were not awarded to bidders who had clearly submitted proof of management experience.”

On top of that, CMS, NJR & Blackhead had offered to supply different equipment to the one that the tender asked for. “This ought to have disqualified the bid of the CMS, NJR & Blackhead JV,” the City concluded.

The scoring of the bids should have been interrogated by a second committee, but records suggest that this second bid adjudication committee (BAC) had barely engaged.

“The BAC met on 25 July 2019. That meeting only lasted a total of four minutes … The BAC merely rubber stamped the recommendation of the BEC without interrogating it,” the City added.

“It is concerning,” Machwene Semenya, an ANC MP and head of Parliament’s portfolio committee on water, said at the time, “that the bid evaluation committee [BEC] was unable to detect deficiencies at the evaluation stage.”

Sinister forces

In fact, there had been two attempts to cancel the Rooiwal contract before it began: in September 2019, rival bidder Bicacon tried to interdict the award arguing that the scoring of the bids was irregular.

The City opposed that case and won, but by January 2020, it had developed doubts as well and cancelled the contract over a technicality.

But Rudolf, who used to be a lawyer, fought back: “​The immediate implementation of the agreement is a matter of extreme urgency … The discharge of raw sewage causes serious environmental degradation and directly impacts upon the lives of those members of the community living downstream from the Rooiwal plant,” he wrote in urgent court filings, sounding more like an advocate for a non-profit than a businessman trying to hold onto a R291-million deal. 

“The result,” he added, “is that for the last decade the Hammanskraal community has been without an adequate source of clean potable water.” Allowing CMS, NJR & Blackhead to keep the contract would be the only way to end “the tremendous prejudice the relevant communities are suffering”.

As a final flourish he warned: “It has … become clear that there are sinister forces operating behind the scenes, which clearly have the aim of derailing the implementation of the contract awarded to the JV. What is clear is that there are various unscrupulous parties that potentially stand to gain from the cancellation of the contract and from a resultant delay, to the detriment of the community.”

Suitably cowed, the City decided not to oppose this second case, and by March 2020, Sodi and Rudolf were back in charge of the Rooiwal project.

“The City of Tshwane received advice at the time that the cancellation could not be lawfully justified and the matter could not be successfully defended at the time,” spokesperson Selby Bokaba told us last year.

It would take another two years for the City’s investigation to produce the evidence it needed to kick Sodi and Rudolf off the contract. And two years was plenty of time to bleed the City dry.

R18 000 a day

As soon as the Rooiwal contract was handed back to Sodi and Rudolf in March 2020, they asked the City of Tshwane for a series of upfront payments to fund expensive pieces of equipment.

The City baulked, but with pressure to fix Rooiwal mounting, it eventually agreed to transfer R71-million to the joint venture.

By November 2021, that money was gone and the Rooiwal project was falling dangerously far behind schedule: “The initial deadline had to be extended due to Covid-19 regulations. The JV started experiencing challenges and the City met with them in a bid to intervene to assist the acceleration of the [project],” Bokaba told us in a written response, adding: “There were a number of intervention meetings…”

Then, in December 2021, a critical piece of equipment – a dewatering belt press – arrived in Durban port.

The belt press was part of the mechanical and electrical works, the half of the project CMS was responsible for completing. Six months earlier, CMS Water had paid a 35% deposit of €278 250 (R4.7-million) to Bellmer, the manufacturer in Germany, and as promised, a container-sized wooden box had arrived with CMS’s name on it.

Now CMS needed to come up with the remaining €500 000 (roughly R10-million), plus shipping costs, demurrage, customs fees and VAT. All of which was going to be an issue.

Meanwhile, the costs of leaving a container-sized box in the port was racking up at R18 000 per day.

Enter Sodi

In March 2022, a CMS Water employee reached out to Franco van der Merwe of VDM Cargo Solutions to arrange for the belt press to be released from Durban harbour and transported to Rooiwal. Van der Merwe had dealt with CMS Water before and it had taken six months and a lot of empty promises from Rudolf to get paid, so this time he asked to be paid upfront.

“CMS Water indicated that they would be able to raise the funds from the [joint venture partner] … as CMS had cash flow issues at the time,” Van der Merwe later wrote in an affidavit to police.

At the end of March 2022, Sodi paid R4-million to Van der Merwe’s VDM Cargo Solutions. And this is where things went spectacularly pear-shaped.

Rudolf still owed money to Bellmer, the supplier in Germany who had to be paid first, so he asked Van der Merwe if he could “borrow … R1.2-million from the funds paid by [NJR] in order to pay salaries and possibly the outstanding amount owed to Bellmer”.

“The agreement was that CMS Water would pay back the money … within a couple of days,” Van der Merwe later told police.

As he saw it, the money had been paid on CMS’ behalf so it was “unimaginable” that CMS borrowing from its own account “could be considered a criminal offence”.

It became clear a week later, Van der Merwe said, that CMS was having trouble paying back the loan.

By the end of April 2022, Rudolf had found the money to pay Bellmer but was either unable or unwilling to return the R1.2-million to VDM that was needed to cover the rapidly rising port storage costs.

“It was around this time that [NJR Project] made direct contact … to establish the reason for the delay in delivering the goods,” Van der Merwe wrote in his affidavit. “I was very upfront about the loan to CMS Water and explained that the port charges were accumulating daily and that a further payment would be required to cover the shortfall. CMS continued to promise payment every week which never happened.”

Arrest

Sodi, of course, was furious, and opened a case of theft and fraud against Rudolf, who was arrested and charged.

Rudolf would later tell his staff that NJR Projects had stolen money from him, and that Sodi had opened a case against him pre-emptively “to make him look like the guilty one”.

Sodi and his company ignored our questions, but no evidence has emerged to support this claim, and the former staff member described it as a “bullshit story”.

But there does seem to have been a kernel of truth to it: Rudolf was convinced that Sodi and NJR were taking too much money from the Rooiwal project.

“When a payment certificate came in from Rooiwal there was always a fight,” the former employee told us. “Edwin [Sodi] would say that the money that we’re claiming, they don’t agree with, we don’t need so much… Rudolph said that every time he compromises… he said they now owe him millions of rands, and… the expenditure for the civil works was already 100% paid out to them but they still want more money.”

So, when Sodi deposited R4-million in VDM’s account, it appears that Rudolf saw a chance to grab some money off the table.

It’s hard to underscore just how reckless this was. R1.2-million should have been pocket change for a company of CMS’s size: only months earlier, the company had declared R98-million in revenue, but internal records show that for months staff had been short-paid, and creditors had been piling up.

Rudolf was now gambling with CMS’s make-or-break contract.

‘They have misled everyone’

Tshwane officials were getting nervous as well.

Since the belt press arrived in Durban in December 2021, progress on the Rooiwal site had been dismal. No one had returned to work after the builder’s holiday in January 2022, prompting a termination letter that gave CMS and NJR 14 days to return to site, failing which the contract would be cancelled.

Crews had finally returned to site on the final day of the deadline, but by March 2022, the City was threatening to cancel the contract again, unless CMS submitted a decent recovery plan.

In May, with no sign of the belt press, the consulting engineers told the City: “We have requested the Contractor to provide a full statement as to how much is still being owed, when they are paying and moving the equipment. They have misled everyone by saying that all the costs pertaining to the equipment clearances, tax, bill of lading and storage have been fully paid and delivery is confirmed.”

They added: “The Contractor has failed on his obligations and has again failed to proceed with the Works in [our] opinion.”

By now, officials were questioning whether the belt press even existed: “[City of Tshwane representatives] contacted me directly as they started having doubts about the facts presented by CMS Water and wanted to arrange an inspection to view the goods [at the port],” Van der Merwe told police.

The Rooiwal contract was officially cancelled in August 2022, after the City’s investigation belatedly concluded that the 2019 tender award was indeed flawed.

“[I]t became clear to the city that the JV was in no position to complete the work it had started,” Bokaba, the city spokesperson, told us last year. 

It took another seven months to get the belt press released from the port, and only after the City agreed to pay R8.4-million to cover CMS’s now astronomical port storage bill.

It arrived at the failing Rooiwal plant in March 2023, just as the first cholera cases began appearing in Joburg.

Prime suspect

Cholera shouldn’t exist in South Africa or in any country with the necessary infrastructure to keep drinking water and wastewater apart. The two systems are unavoidably linked: wastewater – sewage – flows into a treatment plant where waste is removed and clean water discharged into a river; downstream the same water is extracted, purified again, and piped back into a new set of homes as drinking water.

At least in theory.

While the exact cause of the Hammanksraal outbreak was never determined, the sewage-laced water in the Apies River and Leeukraal Dam has always been the prime suspect.

“[T]he original source of the cholera infection has not been located. However, it is highly likely that the cholera outbreak … is related to the pollution of water sources in the area from the City’s Rooiwal Wastewater (sewage) Treatment Works upstream of Hammanskraal,” the Department of Water and Sanitation announced within days of the first case.

For years, the waste dumped by Rooiwal into the Apies river had allowed harmful bacteria – such as E. coli, salmonella, and shigella – to thrive, making it impossible for the Temba water treatment works to turn the contaminated Leeukraal Dam water into clean drinking water. 

“The water treatment works is designed to treat water of a certain quality. Should the quality of the water which is being treated be worse than what the plant is designed for, the plant cannot cope with the load and fails,” Rudolf had explained in his 2020 court challenge.

Although hundreds more cases appeared in June and July 2023, tests were never able to pinpoint where cholera in Hammanskraal was coming from.

Residents had long since learnt not to drink the water from their taps, relying instead on a chaotic system of water tanker trucks. The City had received reports of water tankers illegally selling water sourced from fire hydrants in the Hammanskraal area, but with 27 companies supplying 96 tankers a culprit was never identified.

Only one sample, collected from the Apies river, tested positive for cholera. All the other samples – collected from taps, water tankers and Rooiwal itself – came back negative.

Fraud

By the time the cholera outbreak petered out in August 2023, there had been 1 290 suspected cases and 47 deaths, mostly in Hammanskraal.

Officially, the City of Tshwane doesn’t acknowledge a link between the cholera outbreak and the failed Rooiwal project.

“The cause of the cholera outbreak remains unknown. Credible research institutions … could not find any conclusive evidence that the cholera outbreak was from the City’s water resources,” the City’s then-mayoral spokesperson Sipho Stuurman told us when we spoke to him last year. “[N]o research finding has linked Rooiwal to the Hammanskraal cholera outbreak.”

Still, R291-million had been spent, the Rooiwal project lay abandoned, and accusing fingers began pointing at Sodi.

In June 2023, the City announced it would ask National Treasury to blacklist Sodi for government contracts for the next 10 years. But Sodi protested: “The completion of the [Rooiwal] project ultimately failed due to the fraudulent conduct of Mr. [Rudolf] Schoeman,” he told the City in a 2023 letter, a copy of which was provided to the Sowetan.

“The consequence of the fraud perpetrated by Mr. Schoeman resulted in NJR [Sodi’s firm] laying criminal charges with the SAPS and pursuant to an investigation, Mr. Schoeman was arrested and charged with fraud.”

Rudolf by this point was dead and conveniently for Sodi dead men can’t defend themselves. But did he have a point?

The life and death of a tenderpreneur

When we began digging into the Rooiwal project last year, we initially focused on Sodi, the quintessential tenderpreneur. But soon, our sources were urging us to take a closer look at Rudolf.

What we discovered was that Rooiwal wasn’t the first time Rudolf had been accused of fraud, nor was it the first time that CMS Water had left a project unfinished. 

In 2019, CMS Water had been red-flagged by the Auditor-General for irregularities related to an R85-million tender in Rustenburg. By the time it landed the R291-million Rooiwal contract, six months later, this contract was already under investigation by the Hawks.

In June this year, the Pretoria high court ordered CMS and NJR to pay back the profits they made on the Rooiwal project. But the City of Tshwane isn’t the only municipality knocking on CMS’s now-abandoned door.

By the time CMS was liquidated in February last year, over R1-billion worth of government contracts had either been cancelled or ceded to other companies to complete.

We asked Rudolf’s widow and his father (and long-term business partner) if they wanted to speak on his behalf – both declined. 

But some former employees were willing to speak. Some agreed only if we didn’t use their names: since the Rooiwal debacle many have struggled to find work, and discover they’re only invited to interviews to share an insider’s perspective on the company’s implosion. Some spoke to investigators appointed by CMS Water’s liquidator, who then included their interviews in court papers.

They described Rudolf as ambitious and charismatic, but also at times delusional.

“Rudolf bly in ‘n droomwêreld,” one long-time staff member told CMS’ liquidators. “Hy hallusineer, sy dwelms en sy drank maak dat hy onrealistiese gedagtes het en sekere goed sien as moontlik wanneer ons almal weet dit is nie.”(Rudolf lives in a dream world … He hallucinates, his drugs and his drinking give him unrealistic ideas, and he sees certain things as possible when we all know they aren’t.)

But to a degree, Rudolf wasn’t delusional: it was possible to secure R2-billion worth of government contracts and – despite failing on many – keep securing more. 

How he did it, is a story for Part 2.

Want to hear the story told by the journalists who did the digging? Listen to the DEADLY WATER podcast. Or sign up to our newsletter and get each DEADLY WATER article and podcast delivered to your inbox.

The post DEADLY WATER: The life and death of a tenderpreneur (Part 1) appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.