Recordings and extensive documentation show how controversial businessman Zunaid Moti and co-conspirators appeared to:

• devise a secret share trading scheme to sell shares in property group Rebosis to the company’s founder and CEO Sisa Ngebulana involving a covert “revolving door” mechanism;
• potentially manipulate the company’s share price; and
• plan to strong-arm other investors into letting go of their own shares while plotting ways to manipulate property prices and bribe leasing agents.

These alleged machinations are detailed in transcriptions of conversations – apparently forming part of a criminal complaint lodged by Miller – recorded between Moti and Ngebulana together with Moti’s since-estranged business partner Frikkie Lutzkie.

More on this context below, but it should be noted that the Rebosis information, which is substantial and seems to imply under-the-table deals affecting a public company, has no obvious connection to Miller’s complaint about alleged share manipulation on his own company, Mantengu Mining. No connection, that is, besides Miller’s so far unsubstantiated claims of Moti’s involvement in both, for which he has provided no verifiable evidence and which Moti vehemently denies.

The Rebosis plans were hatched in February 2020 at a time when Ngebulana was seemingly intent on gaining greater leverage over lenders and other shareholders as the group was struggling under a mountain of debt, mainly stemming from a 2015 expansion to the UK which had been torpedoed by the Brexit vote in 2016.

The discussion captured in the recordings involved a strange agreement whereby Moti would seemingly provide Ngebulana with the money with which to buy Moti’s own shares. Ngebulana would however, contribute by giving Moti a R12-million Lamborghini. On the face of it, Moti would end up with the car, which was styled an “option fee”, and Ngebulana with the shares.

More worryingly, this deal appeared expressly designed so that large tranches of shares in Rebosis would change hands without anyone, especially not the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, noticing.

An expert opinion commissioned by Miller to analyse the Rebosis transcriptions noted that this “should be of sufficient concern to the JSE, and that they should launch a detailed investigation”. 

It also appears from the recordings that Moti at the very least claimed to his counterparts that he could and already had set the Rebosis share price at a level of his choosing – according to the expert, a worrying indication, albeit not proof, of market manipulation.

The apparent plot further entailed giving another major shareholder the proverbial offer they can’t refuse by threatening to destroy the value of their investment in order to make them sell.

In Moti’s own words, they would threaten to “fuck the company up and take the assets” in order to “skrik” the shareholder, Arrowhead.

From the recordings, it seemed that Ngebulana was seeking to get control of 25% of the company, which would allow him leeway to set the terms of any restructuring.

At this point, he and Moti appear aligned, before their spectacular fallout in early 2021.

Lastly, the conspirators appear to have discussed paying incentives to agents to arrange leases or organise property valuations and sales that were not necessarily in the best interests of their clients.

Both Moti and Ngebulana have rejected these inferences about the recordings, and we’ll get to their versions in more detail, but their full answers to amaBhungane’s questions can be found here and here.

The last of the three conspirators in the recordings, Lutzkie, told us that he had no idea that what was being discussed was illegal until he afterwards raised it with his own “finance department” after which he immediately withdrew. Lutzkie told us that, unlike Moti and Ngebulana, he was not an expert in financial markets.

Lutzkie is important, however, as he has also since fallen out with Moti and is involved in a long-running legal feud over his purchase of shares in Kilken, a Moti Group company.

Moti told us, “Since Miller is fully aware that I will never be implicated in any wrongdoing insofar as Mantengu is concerned, he has now teamed up with Frikkie Lutzkie in an attempt to create a false narrative that I am somehow part of a syndicate that manipulates the share price of other companies listed on the JSE.”

The JSE says Miller has repeatedly refused to share his evidence with the regulator, including the recordings and transcriptions relating to the Rebosis matter.

Miller has also racked up a series of humiliating court losses against the JSE in his efforts to force the bourse to publish some of his allegations via the official JSE SENS company information portal.

Last week, the JSE launched a high court application to order Miller to hand over evidence or be gagged from further defaming the JSE after he alleged, in a paid for article that two JSE directors were implicated in the share manipulation scheme involving Mantengu.

Apart from Moti and the JSE, Miller’s two most prominent targets in his crusade against the so-called “syndicate” are Moti’s new friend and business partner, Daniel McGowan and Ulrich Bester, the CFO of McGowan’s Liberty Coal group.

McGowan is, of course, the British former business associate of the Gupta family who became a key figure in the legal battles over the ownership of the Gupta’s Optimum Coal Mine after they fled South Africa and the mine went into business rescue. McGowan emerged victorious from that process.

Bester is a former friend of Miller, a shareholder and former CFO in Mantengu and has been the CFO of McGowan’s Liberty Coal (which now owns Optimum) since early 2021.

Both Bester and Liberty are now suing Miller and Mantengu for hundreds of millions of rands in defamation damages following his attempts to link them to the share manipulation syndicate – claims they dismiss as fantastical and unsupported by evidence.

How did Miller, who was a largely unknown figure at the beginning of this year and whom Moti disparagingly refers to as “an ex-game ranger”, manage to accumulate so many powerful enemies in such a short time – and where does Rebosis fit in?

Let’s dig down to the genesis of the syndicate claims. 

The “syndicate”

On 21 June 2024, the sheriff and Mantengu’s legal representatives descended on Bester’s home, armed with an Anton Piller court order – a civil search and seizure order – that Mantengu had obtained ex parte (without Bester being aware or being heard by the court).

Bester later said in court papers, “They seized my devices, documents, and personal data. I cooperated fully and the documents will ultimately bear me out that and confirm that I have nothing to hide.”

The order was based on evidence Mantegu presented that turned on their intended acquisition of platinum miner Blue Ridge, a struggling platinum miner jointly owned by Sibanye Stillwater and an empowerment partner called Imbani.

Key features of Mantengu’s unconfirmed claims included:

• Bester had been contemplating a rival bid for Blue Ridge on behalf of McGowan’s Liberty Coal;
• On or about 15 June 2023, Miller was approached by one Jacques Nel who claimed that a co-ordinated group of investors was planning to manipulate Mantengu’s share price downwards to disrupt the intended transaction with Sibanye (Nel was a former executive who left Mantengu under acrimonious circumstances);
• Mantengu began investigating trades in its shares and, against the backdrop of Mantengu’s share price having decreased from R2.50 on 1 June 2023 to less than R0.50 on 31 January 2024, Mantengu identified various ‘trading anomalies”.
• Trades were anomalous because the volumes were low, and the parties who appeared to be making these trades were “young African people who could be classified in the lowest LSM [Living Standard Measures] category’”. Moreover, because of the broker fees involved, trading such low volumes did not make any commercial sense;
• In addition Mantengu identified a variety of so-called blocking trades in terms of which large volumes of shares were offered for sale at low prices with a view to artificially keeping the share price low. 

In subsequent litigation Bester explained, “According to Mantengu, I am the only person who has the means, opportunity and motive for the share price manipulation… On the strength of these allegations, Mantengu obtained its ex parte order, and it proceed to raid my house.”

Bester, who has categorically denied being behind any share manipulation, was later able to provide a plausible alternate explanation for who, besides him, might benefit from the trades and he raised doubts about other aspects of Mantengu’s case – but that was in the future.

Enter McGowan and Moti

An Anton Piller does not lead to the automatic handover of the seized material. Instead copies are made and held by the Sheriff to give those targeted an opportunity to contest the legality of the search – or raise reasons to exclude some or all of the evidence.

Because he was McGowan’s CFO, Bester’s devices would have held considerable confidential information about Liberty. McGowan, leaving aside his controversial history at Optimum, would have reasonable and legitimate concerns about who might get access to this data.

And at that stage, only Bester had been placed under suspicion, not McGowan.

The Anton Pillar was executed on Bester on 21 June 2024. About two hours after the raid, Moti unexpectedly reached out to Mantengu’s chief operating officer (COO) requesting a “gentleman’s approach to resolving an issue” and requested a “meeting with Daniel McGowan” early the following week.

Moti says this was entirely innocent and coincidental. He had been having lunch with McGowan when they heard of the raid. He knew the Mantengu COO who had previously worked at a Moti Group mine and so offered to broker a meeting to help McGowan secure his corporate information.

Moti of course knew the potential discomfort of having his corporate underbelly exposed – as a series of exposés by amaBhungane and The Sentry following a leak of his own company information showed.

On 24 June 2024 Miller and his lawyer and co-director, Magendren Naidoo, met with Moti, McGowan and their legal team at Motis’ offices in Sandton. According to Miller, the crux of the meeting was as follows:

• Miller confirmed he had no interest in McGowan’s business affairs and was only concerned with stopping the manipulation of Mantengu’s share price.
• Moti and McGowan confirmed that, as far as they were aware, Bester was innocent of all charges but that if he was guilty, he would need to answer for the manipulation.

Thereafter versions diverge.

Miller claims McGowan told them that he could be extremely “nasty” if provoked.

McGowan’s lawyers later told amaBhungane, “Mr McGowan has no recollection of advising… that he could be “nasty”, nor would Mr McGowan use such vocabulary. Mr McGowan does, however, recall advising Mr Naidoo and Mr Miller of his well-known willingness to take appropriate legal action to defend himself and the companies he owns against calumny and untruth.”

Miller claims that Moti made comments and asked questions that “clearly showed” that he knew far too much about Mantengu’s share price for someone who was not a shareholder or who knew nothing about Mantengu’s share price concerns.

In response to initial queries from amaBhungane in May this year, Moti, who has consistently denied any direct or indirect involvement in Mantengu share-trading whatsoever, dismissed this suspicion.

He noted, “What Mantengu doesn’t say is that I referred to publicly available information on the trades in Mantengu shares, which was accessed on a laptop during the meeting in full view of the Mantengu representatives.”

Downhill

Following the meeting things went downhill, slowly and then fast. 

The information seized from Bester is still sitting unopened with the Sheriff while access to it is mired in suit and counter-suit between Mantengu and the Liberty Coal parties.

In August 2024, Mantengu served summons on Bester in which it claims R122-million for damages, a claim Bester is defending.

In September 2024 Miller claimed Mantengu’s security team “secured information which clearly showed that ‘hits’ had been taken out on Naidoo and my life”.

Mantengu also engaged in a series of increasingly acrimonious exchanges with the JSE, both about wanting to report its suspicions to the public via SENS (which the JSE blocked) and about the JSE conducting a proper investigation of its claims.

The JSE insisted it found nothing wrong with the trades and referred Mantengu to the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA), the regulator which is responsible for investigating stock manipulation.

In early May this year, Miller went on the offensive issuing a press release in which he referred to a “criminal complaint” lodged with the police that implicated Moti, McGowan and unnamed JSE executives.

The response from McGowan’s PR team was brutal: “Liberty Coal’s position, simply and briefly, is that Mr Miller, the CEO of Mantengu, is a delusional fantasist who has, for what can at its kindest only be ascribed to some form of unhinged narcissism, allowed his personal failings in that position to lead him down a rabbit-hole of baseless allegations concerning Mantengu’s parlous share performance… Regrettably, it will ultimately also be the shareholders in Mantengu that suffer when Mr Miller’s delusional fantasies are proven to be just that.”

Undeterred, Miller also went on a media roadshow to repeat his claims.

As Bester puts it in his defamation complaint, “Mr Miller not only perpetuated the false narratives that he had peddled before, but he also increased the scope. Specifically, he referred to me and various other parties as drug smugglers that are part of a nationwide criminal syndicate… that was referred to by General Mkhwanazi during his much-publicised media briefing on 6 July 2025.”

Liberty and Bester launched separate defamation actions against Miller and Mantengu, with Liberty claiming R250-million in damages and Bester and his company R25-million.

Miller’s case  has not been helped by the FSCA on 23 May issuing a press release stating that after a thorough investigation,  “No evidence was found to support the allegations of price manipulation”; the transactions that Miller identified as manipulation were “lawful securities transactions in the ordinary course of business”; and the FSCA “found no reason to suspect improper conduct by the JSE or any of its officials.”

Mantengu, alleging the report was rushed and botched, went to court to interdict the FSCA from releasing its investigation report.

Miller and Mantengu are contesting the defamation claims, but they were strong enough for both Liberty and Bester to secure, in August this year, an interim gagging order barring Miller & Co from repeating any defamatory claims until the main action is finalised.

Perhaps that’s why Miller’s focus has shifted to Moti, including via an extraordinary series of of tit-for-tat interviews on Alec Hogg’s BizNews show, beginning with a Miller interview on 14 May, leading to a response from Moti consultant and sometime business partner Paul ‘OSullivan, a counter attack from Miller on 13 October, and finally a broadside from Moti on 27 October, in which he laid out why he believed Mantengu was a failing, possibly fraudulent business.

Back to Rebosis

Important for present purposes, however, is that, in his criminal complaint, Miller says that his public attacks on this “syndicate” led to whistleblowers reaching out to him, who also believe they had been the victims of a Moti-led syndicate.

One such whistleblower provided him with the allegedly incriminating recordings, he says in an affidavit accompanying his criminal complaint.

The plot around Rebosis revealed in the recordings is, however, otherwise unrelated to the still-unfolding Mantengu matter, but so far, it is the most substantial of the allegations Miller has made.

And, importantly, AmaBhungane has access to a range of documents that show how the alleged plan discussed by the conspirators was in fact put into action, practically verbatim, just one day after the recorded discussions.

These documents form part of the huge leak of documents from within the Moti Group of companies, on which we have previous reported.

To recap, the recordings suggest Moti, Ngebulana and Lutzkie discussed a secret share trading scheme to sell shares in Rebosis to the company’s CEO, then Ngebulana; they had a capability to manipulate the company’s share price; and that they planned to strong-arm other investors into letting go of their own shares while plotting ways to manipulate property prices and pay off leasing agents.

In response to our questions Moti specifically denies manipulation of the Rebosis share price but claims that he and Ngebulana had simply agreed to a share sale at a price representing a mark-up to then-prevailing prices. Moti further claims that he actually lost no less than R150-million due to his erstwhile investment in Rebosis. Lastly he told us that the recordings “offer no proof of wrongdoing on my part”.

This is a somewhat sanitised version of what Ngebulana told us which is that Moti had essentially blackmailed him and Rebosis by first buying up Rebosis shares and then demanding to be bought out at a massive premium at a time when his involvement was a serious hurdle to attempts to save the ailing company simply due to the reputational baggage he brings to the table.

The rescue plan involved taking the listed company private, which is to say delisting it. Large institutional shareholders however did not want Moti in the mix and the plan hinged on getting rid of him, claims Ngebulana.

On this version, the recordings would seemingly reflect backroom dealings between Moti and a company boss who had found himself desperately negotiating to save his company from a hostile and opportunistic shareholder.

As it turns out, this would – on Ngebulana’s version – turn out to be a losing battle.

Even if Ngebulana’s version is true, he is still seemingly captured in the recordings participating in discussions about apparent  pay-offs and the intimidation of his own shareholders, specifically Arrowhead.

The extent to which the plot captured in the recordings eventually played out as planned is hard to gauge after Moti had dramatic fallings out with both Ngebulana and Lutzkie some months after the recordings were made.

The meetings

The meetings between Moti, Ngebulana and Lutzkie took place on 12 February 2020. Present were not only the three men but also the Moti Group’s in-house legal counsel. It is clear from the discussion that the parties were busy drafting an agreement as they spoke.

We have been able to match the various parts of the scheme described in the recordings to documents signed the very next day between Moti and his representatives on one hand and a company seemingly representing Ngebulana or his interests on the other.

The signatory is not Ngebulana but rather a close relative. The conclusion that this is a fairly transparent fronting exercise is bolstered by the nearly exact correlation between the terms of deals discussed by Ngebulana in the recordings and the content of these contracts, signed by his relative.

Ngebulana, despite the near-exact correlation with the signed documents, claims that the “discussions” have nothing to do with these contracts but rather related to a later transaction, one we will get to where the conflict with Moti intensified dramatically. 

Secret share trades

One part of the scheme discussed by Moti, Ngebulana and Lutzkie involved a mechanism for Ngebulana) seemingly secretly buying 60 million Rebosis shares held by Moti, his children and Moti Group executive Salim Bobat.

The idea was to disguise the large transfer of shares by breaking it up into small tranches in order to avoid raising suspicions at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. These trades however all had to be at the price of 40c per share which led to the alleged conspirators signing an option agreeing cementing this price beforehand.

In the recording Moti can be heard saying:

MOTI:             It’s not a problem at all. And it’s the right way to deal. Otherwise, we have to do one block placement. Which would cause a lot of kak, I can tell you that now. You don’t want the JSE to suspend the share and start asking why you bought so much stock and whatever. Just be responsible about it.

LUTZKIE:      No, all the numbers has got to be different. None of the numbers has got to be the same.

MOTI:             Can we do that? I tend to agree as well. All the numbers [being] the same show towards a certain common point.

LUTZKIE:      Ja, please. All the numbers has got to differ

MOTI: There’s got to be no number the same. Okay I agree with that. Can you guys do that…8 million, 6 million, whatever.

And:

MOTI:             Get smaller tranches.

LUTZKIE:      Ja, I’ll put another tranche, the smaller the numbers the better.

GRAAFF:       Another tranche. Every one of Zunaid’s ones here, we just under 10. So, like 9, 7 and all of those

These exact terms are captured in an “Option to Purchase” agreement where it is stipulated that 60 million shares will be purchased at 40c per share and can be purchased in tranches. As part of the deal Ngebulana would transfer a Lamborghini worth R12-million to the Moti Group.

On 13 February, the day after the recorded meetings, a “Notice to exercise option” was signed which included a schedule for how the share purchase would be broken up into weekly purchases – always less that 10 million shares at a time – just like Moti directed.

On the same day the parties signed all the necessary share sale agreements between Ngebulana’s nominated company, Moti, Moti’s children and Bobat.

There is however another telling element to the option deal – an on the face of it nonsensical arrangement whereby Moti pays for Ngebulana’s purchases of shares from Moti himself.

The easiest explanation for this is that Ngebulana did not have the required cash at hand – but did have that Lamborghini.

“Cash flow”

One problem the conspirators would be running into, according to Moti, was cash flow. The entire 60 million shares would cost Ngebulana R24-million.

It is however clear that this money would not be Ngebulana’s own funds but rather money provided by the Moti Group itself.

And this part of the scheme would be tailored to the arrangement for breaking the share trades into smaller tranches by effectively recycling the cash.

Moti would send cash to Ngebulana, Ngebulana would use it to buy shares from Moti which would allow Moti to advance it back to Ngebulana and so on.

The idea is discussed in the recordings in straightforward terms

MOTI:             So, the only problem we have is the cash flow.

NGEBULANA:                      Yes.

MOTI:             So, now we’ve got to put 5 or 10 million in your system…

NGEBULANA:                      It’s 4 million.

MOTI:             How much is it? 4 or 5? We just transfer it to you and you       continue. It’s not a problem.

NGEBULANA: Now what takes it longer is, because it’s a smaller amount, so it cycles.

And:

MOTI:             Sisa…we have 4 million of our cash in your system that’s exposed. So, stop it. This is what I’m saying. I always have 4 million with you while you’re doing this whole round thing. You follow what I’m saying?

NGEBULANA:                      Yeah, yeah, of course.

…

NGEBULANA:                      No, it gets back to you.

MOTI:             Ja, but it gets back to me eventually, at the last transfer.

NGEBULANA:                      Every transfer it goes back to you.

The mechanism for this back-and-forth transfer of cash and shares was seemingly a loan agreement between Ngebulana and the Moti Group which had several telling terms.

For one thing the loan amount was for exactly the value of the 60 million shares.

For another, the loan would be disbursed in tranches that exactly match the planned tranches of the share purchases – without fail the money would be provided three to four days before each new share purchase.

And finally, this loan agreement was once again signed on the day following the recorded meetings.

While Moti chose not to address our specific questions about these arrangements, Ngebulana claims that the mention of R4-million actually refers to “a third party shareholder who sold to Moti prior to us acquiring the Moti shares, who advised us and we agreed he could sell his shares to him. Although we did not owe him for these, we did not want to argue with him as we wanted to acquire all his shares.”

As mentioned above, the confluence of the recorded conversation and the documentation makes this assertion questionable.

Which brings us to the point of all this secretive maneouvering.

The “manipulation”

The criminal complaint made by Mantengu Mining CEO Mike Miller (which contains the seemingly incriminating transcripts) related to the alleged manipulation of the share price of his own company, not Rebosis.

Relevant for now is the way Miller describes the modus operandi of the alleged syndicate he is warring with.

Essentially he claims that the syndicate created a “sub market” for Mantengu shares where a group of buyers and sellers cooperate to trade shares back and forth between each other at the price they wanted to manipulate the share price to.

This alleged scheme closely resembles the one discussed, and put to paper, by Moti and his colleagues.

The recordings provide at least one telling exchange where Moti and his collaborators seemingly talk expressly about maintaining the Rebosis share price at desired levels.

MOTI:             You want me to drop the price now?

NGEBULANA:                      No, no, no, it’s okay.

MOTI:             Is it okay?

NGEBULANA:                      Ja, it’s fine.

MOTI:             All right.

NGEBULANA:                      Also, you don’t want funny things.

LUTZKIE:      Ja.

NGEBULANA:                      Just, it’s okay for now.

MOTI:             Let it just remain where it is between 35 and 40 cents.

NGEBULANA:                      Ja, ja.

MOTI:             We don’t want to intervene after this now.

NGEBULANA:                      Ja. Ja, you want to just leave it.

MOTI:             Let it free flow.

An expert opinion commissioned Mantengu from Allan Thomson, the CEO of financial services company Dreadnought Capital, pointed to this exchange as “the most troubling” with regards to possible prohibited trading practices on the JSE.

More generally, Thompson says that “within the provided transcripts there is language used that should deeply troubling to a regulator tasked with prohibiting, regulating and investigating…prohibited trades”.

Looking at the history of the Rebosis share price it is conspicuously that the price plummeted dramatically shortly after this seeming agreement to “let it free flow”.

Also recall that Moti would nonetheless be getting a R12-million car in exchange for shares that were rapidly devaluing.

Ngebulana told us that “I will not comment of ability of Moti to influence share price at the time, he had been an active buyer of the company shares and presumably could influence closing prices.”

He also mentioned that Rebosis had become concerned that someone was manipulating its share price shortly before Moti arrived on the scene.

Moti told us that since he had struck a deal with Ngebulana to offload all his shares at 40 cents per share already “the actual share price of the shares in Rebosis at the time was in fact irrelevant and I deny that any price manipulation took place”.

“Fuck up the company”

Moti and Co wanted to corner another major shareholder into parting with its shares: the property group Arrowhead.

The plan here was to convince Arrowhead boss Mark Kaplan that he could either sell or see his investment eviscerated.

ZUNAID:        We can say to him listen, we want to buy his stock up and give him an option. Price. What’s the maximum we’re going to go up to? 30%?

LUTZKIE:      Do you have a relationship with him or nothing?

SISA:              I’ve got a relationship with him.

ZUNAID:        Ja, but you…

SISA:              But I don’t want him to think…

ZUNAID:        He must not think it’s Sisa.

LUTZKIE:      He mustn’t think it’s you.

SISA:              No.

LUTZKIE:      Okay, but then you must not phone him.

SISA:              You can say listen, we’re seeing a bargain in the market

LUTZKIE:      Ja.

SISA:              And that’s what you specialise in.

LUTZKIE:      The liquidation.

ZUNAID:        You want to strip the company out of its assets, be involved. It’s a two year walk for us.

LUTZKIE:      Ja, we want to liquidate the company.

ZUNAID:        We want to fuck the company up and take the assets.

LUTZKIE:      Ja.

ZUNAID:        Are you in?

SISA:              Ja.

ZUNAID:        What the fuck are you going to do? You want to fuck 75

                        million shares?

SISA:              Yes.

LUTZKIE:      Okay, so.

SISA:              I understand.

ZUNAID:        We must skrik him and take an option.

LUTZKIE:      We want to put the company in liquidation.

ZUNAID:        …and take an option. In all probability he will probably run

                        back to you to do a deal. You realise that right?

SISA:              No, I’m not too sure.

ZUNAID:        Boet, he will run back to you to do a deal when he knows we want to asset strip. Can you imagine he is sitting with fucking 100 million shares or whatever. And you say listen let’s asset strip this fucking thing and fuck it all up. He’ll get mad.

SISA:              And you can say, listen, we’ve done this many times, so don’t worry.

LUTZKIE:      Ja.

ZUNAID:        They just need to look at our reputation, they’ll run away. You agree,

LUTZKIE:      Ja.

ZUNAID:        We’ll do it with pleasure.

LUTZKIE:      But it’s good.

ZUNAID:        When do you want us to do it? This week?

LUTZKIE:      We have to quickly.

SISA:              You can do it tomorrow.

LUTZKIE:      Ja, let’s do it quickly.

When amaBhungane contacted Kaplan he said that he does not want to comment.

In Ngebulana’s version this was again a discussion aimed at executing his rescue plan for Rebosis which involved major shareholders agreeing to delisting the company.

“Moti and company were aware of the Arrowhead shareholding and its importance in getting them on board on the intended ‘take private’ and offered to approach them which I was not adverse to initially, however I advised them I cannot allow them to do it which is omitted from the recordings,” he said.

Irrespective of how this exchange is interpreted it still seems to show the CEO of a company tacitly agreeing to the vicious manipulation of one of his company’s main shareholders – even if he claims to have backtracked later on.

Driving down asset prices

During the recorded conversations another shady practice was discussed – the apparently fraudulent devaluing of the value of properties preceding a sale.

At this point the discussion seems to have digressed away from Rebosis and instead, according to Ngebulana referred to “two property transactions Moti and Lutzkie intended to acquire from an overseas investor”.

According to him it would be possible to reduce the value of a building by manipulating the due diligence process conducted to place a value before a purchase is made or bank finance is arranged.

LUTZKIE:      All right. Tell me, and let’s just quickly run about the property because there’s one or two things that I want to ask about the property. If I understand it correctly, and tell me if I’m wrong, the companies, the two properties now, one in Cape Town, one in Pretoria, is based on the for-sale value currently. But you’re saying that you can do something to make a drop by about 20%.

SISA:              Ja.

LUTZKIE:      And what exactly would you want to do?

SISA:              So, I’m saying that because the bank is going to look for at                            least equity of 20%.

LUTZKIE:      Yes.

SISA:              So, I’m saying the way we do these deals. You know how      many…You know, these phones.

ZUNAID:        You should put that fucking phone away.

LUTZKIE:      Yes.

ZUNAID:        You’ll get your ass kicked.

SISA:              So 20 to 25 and then what you do is, especially with the 10 year lease, in the old days they used to give you 100% but these days banks want some equity. So, you enter into a due diligence process.

LUTZKIE:      Yes?

SISA:              We put a few consultants, technical guys, aircon, mechanical, fire and electrical and things. And then they draw up this silly list. And then they cost it. And then they come up and say, fuck, we need 100 million to fix things here. And then come to me and say, look, unless I come to the party here.

ZUNAID:        The due diligence is failed.

LUTZKIE:      Ja. Ja.

SISA:              And then we go back and forth. But you must start with a silly number of 150.

LUTZKIE:      Yes.

ZUNAID:        Okay. So, we can negotiate.

SISA:              And eventually land at 100.

LUTZKIE:      Yes.

ZUNAID:        But you will help us do that because we don’t know how to do                       it.

SISA:              Ja, ja.

…

ZUNAID:        No, no, we understand, we hear the move. We’re with you on it.

….

ZUNAID:  He’s done many of this, you can see.

Despite the mention of putting away phones, Ngebulana suggests that there is nothing particularly nefarious about what he is describing.

“I advised them on how to drop pricing after an acquisition of a commercial property, that you go and involve professionals to criticize many things with a quantity surveyor (QS) quantifying all the repair work that would need to be done. This would in turn present the discount to the purchase price.”

“This happens even with normal house purchases except that professionals would not be involved,” he told us.

Ngebulana however also addressed this issue in an interview with Miller’s lawyer and an investigator where he more candidly explained what appears to be a severely underhanded practice.

“So, what I do is, you get a comprehensive due diligence and then you get the seller to drop the price….And then you get the building for nothing. Because invariably, a lot of these guys, they’re not even in this country, they’re somewhere else, the buildings have been emptied, they don’t know what the condition of the building is, et cetera.”

This then leads to another shady property sector practice Ngebulana was schooling Moti and Lutzkie in – bribing agents to ignore other potential buyers.

Black holes

In the recordings Ngebulana is captured explaining how he pays “the guys who do the leases” hefty incentives. Importantly, he advises that payment should be made to offshore “black holes”.

NGEBULANA: So, the guys who do the lease obviously want something.

MOTI: How much?

NGEBULANA: Probably 5.

MOTI: Ja we’ll provide.

LUTZKIE:      Ja we’ll set that up.

NGEBULANA: But that’s how these things work.

LUTZKIE:      Ja of course.

MOTI: Exactly. So, we’ll bank 5.

MOTI: So, let’s understand. We’ll put the 5 per deal for the brothers.

NGEBULANA: You don’t deal with the junior guys.

LUTZKIE:      No, no.

NGEBULANA: And also, when you put the 5, I always put it offshore.

MOTI: You just tell us…

NGEBULANA: I create the back holes for the guys, and I put it offshore.

MOTI: Brother, you just tell us where to send it.

NGEBULANA: Ja, that’s right.

MOTI: We’re not worried, am I right?

LUTZKIE:      Ja.

In his later interview with Miller’s lawyer and investigator Ngebulana explained that “you incentivise the brokers to make sure that they convince the sellers to sell to you at the [depressed] price”.

In other words, it seems, you bribe the agents to accept sub-par deals for their property-owning clients who are none the wiser.

The long game

The recordings were made in February 2020 and even though the purpose was ostensibly for Moti to take his money and leave, his entanglement with Rebosis was far from over. Ironically Moti would eventually allegedly cripple Rebosis using a method discussed with Ngebulana – the “negative control” a shareholder with an interest of 25% can exert by vetoing any resolution at a shareholding meeting.

At the recorded meeting, this tactic was foreshadowed, although apparently with a view to Ngebulana being involved:

MOTI:  As long as you can maintain effective negative control of your asset, you are shap. The idea of holding positive control means you need everybody thinking in the same direction. The moment you’re turning at 25.1, you have, if I can point you to veto vote on anything that happens in the company.

LUTZKIE: They can do nothing without (Inaudible) 25.

MOTI: You know if they are sitting there…you’re sitting there, anything you don’t like, you can veto.

NGEBULANA: Sure.

…

LUTZKIE: Well, if Sisa has got the 25%, then obviously he can fix the company and not let it or allow it to get out of control. If you haven’t got that 25, it can get out of control with stupid people like Vasi that’s got their own agenda. But on the 25 he’s got…

MOTI: You can block.

LUTZKIE: You can block.

MOTI: The 25 also blocks rights.

As it turned out, it would later be Moti squaring off against Ngebulana at deadlocked annual meetings.

It was reported in the past how Moti, through his lawyer Manogh Maharaj “derailed” Rebosis annual meetings (see here, here and here) in 2021.

But more interesting is how Moti got to control that much of Rebosis again.

Late in 2020 Ngebulana was again poised to buy out a load of Moti’s shares but the deal fell flat because he could not raise the capital. A dispute ensued with Moti lambasting Ngebulana in public and also launching court proceedings against him until eventually a settlement was reached in early 2021.

The nature of the deal Ngebulana had failed to fund was such that his family trust retained legal ownership of Moti’s shares but that Moti still had the right to sell them to a third party – an unrelated one.

What happened instead is that a new investor showed up which not only bought the Ngbulana shares but also those of Arrowhead.

This new company, Citax Investments, was ostensibly completely unrelated to Moti. He even declared as much in an amendment to his settlement with Ngebulana which read: “The Moti Group parties warrant that, as of the date of signature of this third addendum, they are not associated in any way and at all with the entity known as Citax Investments SA (Proprietary) Limited or its holding company, subsidiaries and/or associates.”

This was false as would later become public knowledge. Documents at our disposal however show how the subterfuge was designed.

Emails between Moti’s legal representative and other people involved in the transaction show how a scheme was devised by which a company registered in the Netherlands (Citax Holdings BV) would own a company in Mauritius (Citax Mauritius) which would in turn own Citax Holdings SA and through it Citax Investments SA.

Citax Investments SA would buy the Rebosis shares using funds initial injected into Citax Holdings BV by Moti.

Adding to the evidence that Citax was a Moti front is the fact that the registration documents for Citax Investments SA show that it was not only registered by a member of Moti’s chosen law firm, but that the company also immediately granted power of attorney to the Moti Group’s company secretary.

In Ngebulana’s telling, the appearance of Citax was the nail in Rebosis’ coffin. The company owned more than 25% of Rebosis and exercised the negative control mentioned earlier to devastating effect.

Moti, again in Ngebulana’s version, left Rebosis hamstrung and before long it abandoned its rescue plan.

Ongoing drama

Despite the fact Miller has thus far produced no evidence linking Moti to Mantegu share trades, that has not stopped him from continuing to attempt to draw Moti into the alleged Mantengu conspiracy.

Last week Miller made fresh allegations in the form of a paid-for article in Business Day which included an email allegedly sent by an executive of the JSE to other conspirators.

In the email entitled “pause of strategy/remain organic” this executive tells the recipient “pressure is mounting as Mantengu continues to challenge and appears to be getting more info. Talk to Zunaid to get him to back off”.

Moti, who is understandably exasperated by the way Miller has kept drawing him in, told us: “I wish to remind you that neither the JSE NOR the FSCA have found any share price manipulation in Mantengu.

“The email from an anonymous email server could have been sent by anyone, including Miller himself, in an effort to once again drag my name into this non-issue.

“I was not aware that Amabhungane have pivoted from “investigative journalism” to fiction.

Finally, I have repeatedly stated that I was never involved in any share price manipulation. “This is still true despite Miller’s (rather amateur) attempt with the fake email… To the extent that such an email does exist I hope that the Hawks are in fact able to trace the source, as this will show that I am not involved in any way.”

The post Behind the meltdown: Miller v Moti, McGowan and the JSE appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

In Part One of this investigation we showed how Moti’s Zimbabwean mining operation African Chrome Fields (ACF) became the centre of an immense R2-billion money moving operation.

The purpose was seemingly in part to spirit capital out of Zimbabwe – possibly illicitly – while in South Africa, money allegedly linked to this scheme was received through another equally perplexing system.

A key intermediary was allegedly a well-known Moti associate from the underground financial world, a man widely known as “Joe Dollars”.

It was purportedly at his command that millions were channelled through the notorious VBS Mutual Bank and other means into Moti company coffers under the guise of suspicious “property development loans”, later converted into an implausible investment in supposed “ground-breaking” metallurgical technology.

As we will see, these explanations for the money flows struggle to withstand scrutiny, not least because Moti’s supposed partners in these deals deny they ever happened.

An improbable property deal

At the same time the Zimbabwean money-moving system took off, a total of 13 different property companies in the Moti Group in South Africa, one after the other, signed nearly identical loan agreements with a South African entity called Ultra Trading 014.

Crucially, it would however not be Ultra Trading providing the money but rather unidentified third parties for whom Ultra Trading’s representatives would stand as apparently no-questions-asked “guarantors”.

The loans were on easy terms. There is no mention of interest being charged and there also seems to be no real consequence to a default on Moti’s end.

Meanwhile, the guarantors agreed to “meet the demands and make payment to any third party that may lay claim against the Borrower”.

The two generous guarantors who signed off on the Ultra Trading loans were Yusuf Suliman Ismail and Imraan Mia Ismael.

Masses of “transfers of funds on behalf of Ultra Trading 014” started flowing immediately.

In December 2017 alone at least R80,7-million was injected into Moti Inc. according to partial records in the #MotiLeaks.

Suspiciously, payments in terms of these loans were broken up in small chunks as reflected in a multitude of transfer statements signed by Ismail and Ismael. For instance, up to 32 separate payments would be made on a single day.

This seems to be at odds with how large loans for a property development would be disbursed.

Over the course of the following six months Ultra Trading paid (or made third parties pay) at the very least R335-million to the Moti property companies through these piecemeal transfers.

A tally of all the debts is contained in the #MotiFiles:

At this point is it worth asking: who is Ultra Trading, who are the mysterious third parties providing the money – and where is the cash coming from?

The Dollar brothers

Although he denies it, knowledgeable and independent sources as well as documentary evidence indicate that Yusuf Ismail, one of the two Ultra signatories on the loans, is in fact a prolific operator in South Africa and Zimbabwe’s “informal” financial sector known as “Joe Dollars”.

One indication from the #MotiFiles that Ismail is the owner of the colourful moniker comes from Moti’s copious prison letters from late 2018. In one letter Moti talked about using “Joe Dollars” to move money in a scheme which closely resembled an actual agreement later entered into with Ismail’s company Ismail Property Holdings.

Ismail is also the brother of another well-known operator who goes by the name “Mo Dollars”.

In correspondence contained in the #MotiFiles related to an inquiry into the tax affairs of a Moti associate, Mark Lifman, Mo Dollars cropped up in a letter sent by Moti’s lawyers to Sars.

The moniker is so well established that even SARS, in formal correspondence, has called the elder Ismail brother “Mo Dollar”.

Documents from the #MotiFiles leak show that Mo also knows Moti. Another document shows Moti apparently knew Yusuf “Joe Dollars” Ismail as far back as 2011.

In response to questions Moti said he cannot “recall specifically when I first met Yusuf or Mohamed Ismail, or what the context of such a meeting was. It was a long time ago”.

He added that he has not “personally conducted any other business with them”.

In late 2017 and 2018 Moti’s property companies were however, as we saw above, doing extremely brisk business with the younger Dollar brother.

Mystery money

So, if Ultra Trading was merely the conduit, where was the money from?

In Part One of this investigation, we revealed how Moti’s African Chrome Fields disbursed around R1,7-billion he had received from well-connected Zimbabwean fuel tycoon Kudakwashe Tagwirei into a multitude of opaque companies north of the border.

There is reason to suspect that some of this money flowed to South Africa under the auspices of the “property loans” guaranteed by Joe Dollars.

While the Ultra Trading loan agreements in the leak show “third parties” would be putting up the supposed loans, nothing in the leak identifies these parties. Other sources, however, provide clues.

One key link is the doomed VBS Mutual Bank.

We recently also revealed how three accounts at the VBS had been used as an apparently enormous hawala system circumventing Zimbabwe’s exchange controls.

Read about this astonishing episode in the saga of VBS Mutual Bank here.

Hawala is a way to transmit money without any currency actually moving. Hawala provides anonymity in its transactions, as official records aren’t kept and the source of money can’t be tracked.

This VBS hawala was allegedly set up by the Macmillan family whose pre-eminent member Ewan implicated himself in alleged money laundering during interviews with undercover journalists from Al Jazeera.

As we saw in Part One, several payments to Moti through VBS Mutual Bank carried the reference “Ultra trading 014”.

Many of these payments can be linked directly to the Joe Dollars deals.

The #MotiFiles leak contains a multitude of “transfer of funds” statements. These provide dates and values for payments made to Moti’s companies by third parties “on behalf of” Ultra Trading.

These often correspond perfectly with payments captured in VBS records. In other words, Joe Dollars payments captured in the #MotiFiles are precisely mirrored in independently acquired VBS records.

The fact that these payments seemingly came through an illicit VBS hawala system raises numerous questions, including about possible breaches of Zimbabwe’s capital controls.

However, showing that at least some of the Joe Dollars money came through VBS only peels back one layer of the onion.

Most of the money that made its way to Moti “on behalf of” Ultra Trading (Joe Dollars) did not go via VBS but through other mostly unknown channels.

One of these involves another well-known party implicated in South Africa’s money laundering industry but amaBhungane cannot reveal who without compromising sources.

But irrespective of how the money arrived, once the money got to Moti, what happened to it?

Project Z-Steel

Up to this point we have seen the Moti Group receive tens of millions of dollars in Zimbabwe and distribute it through a suspicious loan arrangement with a Zimbabwean partner – only to see hundreds of millions of rands appear in South Africa under the guise of “property loans” moving into the Moti Group, including through suspicious channels like VBS.

On 21 June 2018 all of the Ultra Trading property loans to the Moti property companies were however abruptly simultaneously cancelled.

The outstanding balance of R355-million was, according to a Subscription and Shareholders Agreement, converted into shares in another Moti company called Afrique Chroma.

According to this agreement Ultra Trading had to pay in another R271-million in order to get a 40% share in this company, which was presented as a development company for a supposedly ground-breaking aluminothermic chrome refining process, code-named Project Z-Steel.

The total investment was R606-million (the cancelled loans and the additional payment) which meant that Afrique – which owned the aluminothermic process – was being valued at an astonishing R1,5-billion.

Moti claims that the property loans were for legitimate developments, but that Ultra Trading decided to rather embark on this new venture.

“Ultra Trading 014 originally advanced various loans to the Moti Group in order to develop various properties. Subsequently the parties agreed not to proceed with the developments and Ultra Trading 014 opted to invest in Afrique Chroma by way of a shares subscription. Afrique Chroma had specialised technology that can process chrome without the need for electrical currents, this industrial know-how was of very high value to Ultra Trading 014.”

This seems open to doubt, even discounting the suspicious nature of the payments coming from “third parties”, including via VBS.

Genuine innovation or expensive gimmick?

Moti has been promoting his supposedly unique aluminothermic technology for years. It has in fact acquired an almost mythical stature, becoming the basis of several appeals for concessions in Zimbabwe.

In 2015 the “theft” of this technology was one of the criminal complaints Moti levelled against his Russian nemesis Alibek lssaev – a battle that would eventually lead to Moti getting outmanoeuvred and stuck in a German prison for five months in late 2018 and early 2019.

In 2015 he used the technology as the basis of an application for National Project Status for ACF – a designation that comes with a number of regulatory concessions.

As far back as 2016 he used concern for this allegedly invaluable technology to petition the government of Zimbabwe for a special diplomatic passport, according to a letter dated 20 January that year contained in the #MotiFiles. Allegedly he was being summonsed to an unidentified enquiry where he would have to divulge details of the technology.

In response to questions Moti said: “I did not, and do not hold a diplomatic passport from any country. I am also not aware of the so-called inquiry you are referring to.”

Moti has recently placed paid-for articles about the technology in several South African newspapers and had at least one large ceremonial launch for it in Zimbabwe, already back in 2018.

The aluminothermic process is actually an old and generic technology. Fine aluminium granules are mixed with processed ore and ignited, thereby acting as a reducing agent to separate out the desired metal. It was invented in 1898.

The aluminium combustion avoids the need for an electric furnace, making the process suitable for Zimbabwe, where there are electricity shortages, but its commercial viability is extremely tenuous without a nearly-free supply of normally costly aluminium, according to metallurgists consulted by amaBhungane.  

Moti’s claim to having a “revolutionary” piece of IP in hand relates only to the specific “recipe” of reactants to be used in the plant to optimally interact with the specific ore ACF needs to process.

Our sources say this claim is highly unlikely.

Even if they are wrong, is it worth R1,5-billion as Ultra Trading’s “investment” would suggest?

Documents in the #MotiFiles show the actual estimated cost of the revolutionary plant in Zimbabwe was expected to be in the region of $1-milion, as captured in a 2015 environmental impact assessment.

The files also include a budget breakdown from late 2017, not very long before the Ultra Trading deal, where the construction of the plant is pegged at around R25-million.

An argument can be made that the cost of the plant is immaterial because the value lies in the process and its income going forward.

Even on this basis the valuation is a massive stretch. According to one contemporaneous 2018 document Moti’s partner in ACF, Zimbabwean mogul Kudakwashe Tagwirei was going to pay $5,4-million (R70-million) for 30% of the project – a fraction of what Ultra Trading was supposedly paying.

This makes it appear that the “investment” may have been simply a cover to eliminate the iffy loans on paper and move some more money into the Moti group on the side.

Implausible deniability

The biggest problem with Moti’s claims is however this: despite Moti’s assurances Ultra Trading’s Imraan Ismael and his partner Joe Dollars (Yusuf Ismail) deny any of this ever happened.

Asked about the property loans signed by his client, Ismail’s lawyer Ian Levitt responded in writing that “our client has no knowledge hereof and is thus unable to answer the question”.

Asked about the investment in Afrique Chroma where Ismail is given as the guarantor and contact person for Ultra, Levitt similarly replied on his behalf: “Our client has no knowledge hereof and is thus unable to answer the question”.

And it continues. Asked about his relationship with his co-signatory on all the documents Imraan Ismael, Ismail’s lawyer simply claimed “no relationship”.

Asked about Moti’s R18,5-million debt to Yusuf Ismail Property Holdings, he once again has “no knowledge” of it.

It is the same with Imraan Ismael. Contacted by phone by amaBhungane’s partner The Sentry and asked about the various deals, he claimed not to know his partner Yusuf and not to know about Afrique Chroma. He ultimately declared that “no, I don’t even know these people”.

Moti attempted to counter this by claiming that “you are either purposefully misquoting a conversation with Ismael or have gotten hold of the wrong person altogether”.

Moti continued that “Ismael confirmed in writing to us that he knows us, and that our agreements stand”. As proof he provided a screenshot of a curt email where Ismael does indeed say that “I agree with you that they are making absurd allegations and are incorrectly quoting me”.

But all Moti could seemingly coax out of his partner is a generic reference to unspecified transactions.

“As far as our transactions are concerned the agreements stand and all our dealings should remain private. I would appreciate if you could also respect that privacy during this media witch hunt,” said Ismael to Moti.

This email was sent two days after amaBhungane sent questions to Ismael but Ismael himself elected not to respond to us.

Ismael’s equivocation and Joe Dollars’ outright denials are astounding. Both men’s signatures appear on all thirteen Ultra Trading loans as well as all the transfer statements related to these loans. They are parties to the Afrique deal and Ismael even signed off on a “due diligence” letter for said deal.

There are only two possible conclusions: either Joe Dollars and his partner are running for cover – or, arguably less likely, they have been the victims of a massively elaborate attempt to pin dodgy dealings on them with copious forged documents.

Either way it is clear that Moti has some explaining to do.

There is more to this story, so watch this space.

The post #MotiFiles: Moti and the money men PART 2 appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

In less than a year well over R2-billion moved through these mechanisms, funds mostly derived from investments by his former partner in Zimbabwe, the politically connected Kudakwashe “Kuda” Tagwirei.

AmaBhungane has been able to tie Moti to two separate money-moving operations using extensive documentation in the #MotiFiles leak and another unexpected source – the wreckage of the doomed VBS Mutual Bank.

In this regard we today also publish the astonishing story of a gigantic hawala system that had been run out of VBS. Read that story here.

Despite its complexity the picture ultimately boils down to this: vast amounts of money were channelled from Moti’s African Chrome Fields (ACF) to a range of mysterious Zimbabwean entities (some linked to the country’s political leadership) under the guise of loans to a different Zimbabwean business partner, Patrick Chinondo.

At the same time, across the border, a mountain of money appeared in South Africa, flowing to Moti Group companies under the guise of “property loans” that, on the surface, were unconnected to the Zimbabwean transactions.

We will see how VBS became a bridge between the different role-players in the two countries before the bank imploded in early 2018, suggesting these Moti transactions in Zimbabwe and South African were two sides of the same coin.

There is reason to suspect they formed a single scheme aimed, at the very least, at improperly exporting capital from Zimbabwe. Moti denies and contests the basis for this suspicion.

In Part One of this investigation, we deal with the first operation based in Zimbabwe which saw Moti’s ACF distribute the largesse received from prominent Zanu-PF benefactor Tagwirei.

In Part Two we will cast an eye across the border to South Africa where an operator called “Joe Dollars” was seemingly enlisted to route hundreds of millions of rands into Moti’s labyrinthine group of companies.

And while Moti has defended these manoeuvres as legitimate and separate business deals, he faces one awkward hurdle: despite copious documentation, the partners he allegedly transacted with vociferously deny key aspects of his version.

It is important to try to establish the truth because, as the Al-Jazeera #GoldMafia series has documented, Zimbabwe has become a hub for illicit money flows, with implications for citizens, businesses and governments throughout the region.   

To better understand all of this we however need to take a step back – and look at how Moti may have found himself needing to get piles of cash out of Zimbabwe, the country whose development he has long claimed to be deeply invested in.

STEP ONE: “A FUCK-TON OF MONEY”

Moti made his grand entrance into Zimbabwe in 2014 with what would become his flagship mining venture, ACF.

From the get-go the company was immersed in Zimbabwean politics, bringing onboard a partner company owned by the country’s military and hiring then-vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa’s son as a “consultant”.

The money-moving operation, as far as amaBhungane can establish, however started in late-2017 in the middle of the coup that toppled Robert Mugabe.

As a political storm was gathering Moti forged an alliance with “Kuda” Tagwirei, a businessman with well-documented ties to Zanu-PF as well as to Mugabe’s challenger and the current president, Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Tagwirei is a fuel tycoon who was controlling shareholder of the lucrative Zimbabwe operations of Trafigura, the global commodity trading behemoth which has long had an iron grip on parts of the country’s energy sector.

He has enjoyed several concessions from the state and has more lately found himself on US and UK sanctions lists.

Moti’s relationship with “Kuda” blossomed rapidly into enormous infusions of cash.

Barely a month after their first introduction, in the middle of the coup, Moti signed a transformative deal with Tagwirei – the sale of 30% of ACF for $120-million (then R1.7-billion).

The full mechanics of the deal were slightly more complicated.

The seller of the 30% was technically a company called Spincash owned by local Zimbabwean Moti allies (with a minority stake held by an associate of Vice President Constantino Chiwenga).

Moti denies he or his family had any financial interest in Spincash and said it was referred to as part of the Moti Group merely “for ease of reference”.

In response to a claim that he exercised “effective control” over Spincash he told us, “Alleged ‘effective control’ of anything can also not automatically be equated to a financial interest therein. It is very much possible to ‘control’ something without having any interest in it.”

It was nonetheless ACF rather than Spincash that received the payment from Tagwirei. According to Moti, this is because it did not have its own bank account.

“Spincash, which did not operate a bank account, requested that ACF receive the funds on their behalf, and ACF obliged. No more, no less. There is nothing ‘improbable’ about such an arrangement – Spincash ultimately still received what was due to it in terms of the transaction.”

But the end result was that Moti’s ACF was suddenly on the receiving end of millions of dollars, spread over several months.

But there was more.

Among the leaked #MotiFiles there are two loan agreements from early 2018 whereby Tagwirei made available $9-million to Moti Holdings, a group company in Dubai, and $8-million to Moti’s wife (about R200-million put together).

Both loan agreements vaguely record that the money was for “investments in art, investment cars and…equity investments in private or listed companies”.

In September 2018 Tagwirei extended another loan for 30-million RTGS, technically $10-million in the “digital” Zimbabwean currency at the time, to one of Moti’s aspiring mining companies, Pulserate Investments.

This loan, judging by another document in the #MotiFiles, a briefing to Moti during his incarceration in Germany, appears to have been facilitated in part by Zimbabwe’s post-coup vice president Constantino Chiwenga, often referred to as “No. 2” in internal Moti Group correspondence.

Moti told us the loans to Moti Holdings and his wife were never fully utilised and in any case were fully paid back.

All of this nonetheless set the scene for Moti and his companies becoming progressively larger recipients of cash from Tagwirei.

In a leaked recording of a 2022 meeting of top Moti Group executives, in-house legal boss Natalie Graaff pointed out that they could not practically extricate themselves from Tagwirei because it would be too expensive. By this time the association with Tagwirei had become something of a liability due to sanctions imposed on him.

“How do you get him out now? You’re going to have to buy him out. It’s a lot of money. He gave us a fuck-ton of money,” said Graaff.

More important however is what Moti seemingly did with that “fuck-ton” of money.

STEP TWO: ZIM MEGA-LOANS AND MULTI-PAYMENTS

Almost immediately after signing the $120-million deal with Tagwirei in November 2017, Moti’s ACF signed a separate loan agreement with JayT Global Bureau du Change, a company belonging to one Patrick Chinondo – a Zimbabwean partner to Moti in this and other enterprises.

The loan was huge: After several amendments over the following months Moti offered JayT at least $75-million (roughly R1-billion) in total.

In June 2018 this arrangement was succeeded by a practically identical new loan between ACF and another Chinondo company called Oakland Mining.

Asked about these loans, the Moti Group said that it was part of a strategy to safeguard the value of the money received from the ACF-Tagwirei deal by sinking it into other investments via JayT and Oaklands.

At the time Zimbabwe had adopted the US dollar but was experiencing an acute shortage of the currency. This led to a relative devaluation of electronic account balances (which in practice could not be withdrawn).

These deals are in ACF’s name despite the money allegedly belonging to Spincash, which is not mentioned in the loan agreements at all.

The arrangement with JayT and then Oakland was also extremely peculiar.

Instead of ACF actually advancing money to these borrowers, it would instead receive a constant torrent of “payment instructions” from the Chinondo companies.

These would tell ACF to rather pay money directly to other third parties.

Through this system Moti’s ACF made 505 payments to dozens of different recipients between November 2017 and September 2018. The grand total: an astonishing $130-million (roughly R2-billion at the time).

Red flags

There is reason to interrogate Moti’s claim that all this was a legitimate scheme to protect the value of his company bank balances.

First and foremost, the owner of both JayT and Oakland, Patrick Chinondo, outright denies most of these payments ever happened.

On his version he borrowed “small amounts”, not millions of dollars, and stopped issuing payment directions long before most of the payments were made in his name by Moti’s ACF.

This is despite the loan agreements bearing his signature explicitly referring to vast sums of US dollars and the payment instructions as well as ACF records showing the payments going through.

Confronted with this evidence Chinondo responded that “the so called evidence…could have been tampered, fabricated, edited and doctored documents to meet the narrative you seek to establish”.

Asked about the loan agreements, Moti in contrast never challenged their existence or the quantum.

Both versions cannot be true.

Irrespective, the transactions themselves are problematic.

For one thing, some of the money flowing out of ACF seemingly lined the pockets of senior politicians including Zimbabwe’s president, vice president and the then-minister of communication.

A President’s farm, a ‘frontman’ and a minister

One $1-million payment ACF made soon after coup, on 5 December 2017, on JayT’s instruction, was to a company called Pricabe Enterprises. According to Zimbabwean media this is the holding company for President Mnangagwa’s farm.

ACF’s cash accounts, also contained in the #MotiFiles leak, duly show the money being paid out under the guise of a “loan payment”.

Another notable recipient was Cosmotex Investments, a company owned by Zimbabwean businessman Lishon Chipango. Chipango is, according to Zimbabwean sources, a proxy for the military commander who became vice president after the coup, Constantino Chiwenga. This company received $1-million in December 2017, according to the ACF accounts.

And money also went to the then-minister of communications, a significant Zanu-PF veteran.

In other words, in the weeks following Zimbabwe’s coup Moti’s ACF made payments on JayT’s instructions totalling some R26-million rand to the benefit of key members of the country’s new leadership who held the fate of his most prized asset, his chrome mine, in their hands – though this was allegedly on the instruction of Chinondo.

Moti told us, “I reject all allegations that ACF was involved in money laundering or corruption. All its dealings (even with prominent political figures) were correct and in the ordinary course of business.”

Apart from politicians, more of the ACF payments made on Chinondo’s orders raise questions.

Mystery accounts

The largest chunk of the cash flowing out of ACF, just shy of $60-million, apparently did go to entities belonging to Chinondo himself – JayT, Oakland Mining and Oakland Global Investments. It is however unlikely that this was the final destination, which we will get to shortly.

If we strip out payments to Chinondo, the rest of the money flowing from ACF according to the “payment instructions” largely went to only three recipients who between November 2017 and September 2018 received 279 payments totalling $50-million (roughly R650-million).

The three companies receiving most of this money were called Retoch Investments, Ask and Get It and Kunjani Duty Free Investments.

All three companies have missing company records at the Zimbabwean Registrar of Companies and Chinondo denies any knowledge of them. It is not known who controlled them or what the money was for. However, watch this space.

To sum up, the politically connected Zimbabwean tycoon Tagwirei provides Moti’s ACF with hundreds of millions of rands in the aftermath of the 2017 coup. ACF in turn enters into loan agreements equally worth hundreds of millions but which the supposed borrower denies. ACF nonetheless pays the millions, apparently on the borrower’s instructions, to opaque recipients about whom no information is available as well as a portion to the seeming benefit of top Zimbabwean politicians.

STEP THREE: VBS AND JOE DOLLARS – A PREVIEW

VBS Mutual Bank collapsed in March 2018 after being pillaged by its management.

In a separate exposé today, we reveal how the bank also hosted an enormous hawala system used by many Zimbabwean businesses and individuals, seemingly to circumvent exchange controls.

The system seemingly involved illicit gold smuggling and the notorious Macmillan family which has most recently been implicated in money laundering by Al Jazeera in its “Gold Mafia” series.

It appears that VBS also played a role in the movement of funds by the Moti Group and its partners.

Although Moti denies all knowledge of the VBS system, bank records show that it was used to pay millions to his South African companies, seemingly via Chinondo and the afore-mentioned Joe Dollars.

Between 30 November and 18 December 2017 one of the VBS accounts – Caydees Imports and Exports – made 8 payments to 7 Vlok Road Bryanston (a Moti property holding company) totalling just shy of R12-million.

Once again, this flow of funds followed hot on the heels of the coup and the first infusion of Kudwirei’s cash.

Most of these payments reference “JayT Global”. This suggests that some of the money that went from ACF to Chinondo in fact then somehow went back to the Moti Group in South Africa in a way that cut straight through Zimbabwe’s desperate exchange control regime which has been trying to keep scarce dollars in the country.

Upon inspection it is clear that Moti companies also received VBS money tied to someone else besides JayT (Chinondo).

Further payments to Moti companies using VBS brought the total to R26-million spread across less than three months.

Several payments reference “Ultra Trading 014” and evidence suggests that there was another hidden hand in these payments made through VBS and additional channels – long-time Moti associate “Joe Dollars”.

Moti told us, “I have no knowledge or context to the name ‘Caydees Import and Export’ and have not dealt with them in any manner… I have not obtained bank statements of other entities (illegally or otherwise), so I cannot comment on the content thereof. The only facts that I know is that 7 Vlok Road Bryanston received funds into its bank account under the Ultra transactions.

“Our dealings with Ultra were indeed explained to our bankers in detail at the time, and they raised no objection thereto. I fail to see why, if they were satisfied, you see fit to question these transactions.”

For more on this, read Moti and the money men PART 2 tomorrow morning.

The post #MotiFiles: Moti and the money men appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

Mr Zunaid Moti lodged a complaint against amaBhungane with the South African Press Ombud. 

The complaint alleged that the article breached the South African Press Code on three grounds, namely misrepresentation of facts, the use of a manipulated image and the lack of a right of reply. 

The Press Ombud, Herman Scholtz, rejected the complaint on the first two grounds but found that Mr Moti had not been afforded an effective right of reply prior to publication.

AmaBhungane apologises for this.

In response to the invitation by the Ombud to respond in more detail to the article, the Moti Group stated that “neither Zunaid Moti, nor the Moti Group, have ever had any dealings with VBS or its management,” and added that he was “not comfortable commenting on the article in detail since there are open investigations against Clinton van Niekerk and his cohorts”.

The article has been updated to reflect his comment.

The full ruling by the Press Ombud can be accessed here. 

Between late 2016 and up to the collapse of VBS Mutual Bank in March 2018 a colossal hawala scheme seemingly operated through three VBS accounts, receiving and rapidly paying out roughly R1.3-billion to a wide array of South African companies and individuals.

A hawala is a money-transfer system which involves paying an operator in one country who then instructs a counterpart in another country to release an equivalent amount to the intended beneficiary without any formal cross-border payments taking place.

The object is to circumvent banks and financial authorities.

Evidence suggests that this VBS scheme, seemingly powered by the profits of the illicit gold trade, was rapidly gaining steam when the collapse of the bank cut it short.

The VBS hawala system seemingly served two purposes:

On the one hand, it helped Zimbabweans, including it appears some legitimate businesses, to completely circumvent the country’s extreme exchange controls.

On the other, the scheme seemingly served as a mechanism for money laundering and illicit financial flows via the shadowy local gold industry.

Among the recipients shortly before the bank collapse were companies in the Moti Group who received millions, apparently as part of a convoluted money-moving operation that is the subject of our latest #MotiLeaks exposé, also published today.

A spokesperson for Moti told us, “Neither Mr Zunaid Moti, nor the Moti Group, have ever had any dealings with VBS or its management.”

Other notable recipients of money out of this system include different members of the Macmillan and Rudland families of Zimbabwe, both linked to alleged money laundering, as well as possibly one high-flying member of the Mugabe family, among many others.

The scheme at VBS was allegedly set up by family members of notorious alleged Zimbabwean money launderer Ewan Macmillan, outed by Al Jazeera in its “Gold Mafia” documentary series earlier this year.

Furthermore, evidence gathered by investigations into VBS’ collapse point towards bribes totalling several million rand having been paid to the bank’s bosses by whoever controlled this system.

The setup

Most of the attention paid to VBS revolved around the patronage networks developed between bank bosses and politicians. But before its collapse under the weight of management fraud in early 2018 the bank became a nexus of all kinds of alleged criminal schemes united by one thing: the utility of a bank that could be counted on to look the other way.

By way of example, amaBhungane previously reported on what appeared to be a money laundering operation whereby VBS helped expatriate millions stolen from a Namibian bank.

Investigators sifting through the wreckage of VBS however found three accounts whose transaction volumes dwarfed virtually everything else that was going on at the doomed institution.

These accounts belonged to closely related South African companies: Caydees Imports and Exports, Caylons Goods and Services and Taintons Goods and Service.

Together, these accounts sometime paid out just shy of R100-million per month. The earliest and longest-lived by far was Caydees, which was flagged as worthy of further investigation by Werksmans Attorneys who undertook the earliest forensic analysis of VBS in 2018.

Their report, a confidential annexure to the public “Great Bank Heist” report produced by Advocate Terry Motau, showed that there was reason to believe that VBS management was bribed to pave to way for this money moving system to be set up.

It may even have been instrumental to the original hijacking of the bank.

Caydees had separate accounts at Standard Bank and ABSA which paid money into VBS accounts belonging to “persons of interest”, the investigators found.

R13.7-million was paid from Caydees’ ABSA account into a VBS account used by companies tied to former VBS chair Tshifhiwa Matodzi to buy the shares that ultimately led to the bank falling under his control.

Further payments of over R3-million were allegedly made to Matodzi-tied companies and another R920 000 to the CEO of VBS Andile Ramavhunga.

Matodzi and Ramavhunga are still facing charges over their alleged looting of VBS.

On the other side of the equation the creators and controllers of the three accounts are harder to discern.

The director of all three companies was one Chantell Groenewald, but she is understood to have been a stand in for other interests. She failed to respond to questions.

Some sources indicate that the accounts were set up by a family member of the notorious Ewan Macmillan who was recently caught on camera offering undercover reporters from the investigative team of Al Jazeera his services as a money launderer in their “Gold Mafia” documentary series.

Bank records reflect the Macmillan family using the VBS accounts frequently for relatively trivial payments, among others for the wedding of Sarah Rudland (tobacco baron Simon’s daughter) to Bruce Macmillan, brother to Ewan.

While the first hawala account, Caydees, was already set up in late 2016 the other two, Taintons and Caylons, only started up in late 2017, shortly before VBS collapsed.

But perhaps more interesting than how the system was created is how, and by whom, it was funded.

Gold and Jewels

In order for a hawala to work you not only need an agent to collect money in country A, you need a party to make payments in country B. But since the whole point is to avoid formal cross-border payments how does the party in country B get all the cash they need?

According to accounts obtained by amaBhungane, on the Zimbabwean side the operators of the VBS accounts physically collected US dollars from clients who needed to make foreign payments or simply wanted to smuggle money out of Zimbabwe – illicit capital flight the country could hardly afford. At the time it was virtually impossible to transact through the formal banking system because the Zimbabwean Reserve Bank would effectively confiscate US Dollars and replace them with barely-usable local currency.

Following the cash collections in Zimbabwe, the hawala accounts at VBS in South Africa would get credited with millions from a source that immediately raises red flags: the second-hand gold industry.

One major contributor to the VBS hawala was J R Technical Services which paid over R120-million into the hawala in South Africa.

We have encountered this company before, in a tax case between SARS and a gold refinery called Rappa Resources which was implicated in the multi-billion rand gold export scheme.

The scheme involved what SARS dubbed “second tier” gold suppliers who often only existed on paper allegedly buying illicit gold and selling it to “first tier” suppliers who in turn sold it to Rappa after various degrees of refining. Along the way they would allegedly create false paper trails to legitimise the gold.

Fake invoices would present the metal as coming from scrap purchased at for instance pawn shops (which would attract VAT). When this gold is refined into gold bars and exported the sale is VAT-free which means they qualified for massive tax refunds. However, since much of what was getting exported was really illicit gold, no VAT was ever paid and the refunds were really theft from the state.

The illicit gold included tons of smelted Krugerrands, which is illegal given that these coins are considered legal currency, but another source, according to SARS, was likely also gold procured from illegal mining – and smuggling from across the border.

This is where the link to Zimbabwe becomes doubly interesting.

J R Technical, which fed the VBS hawala, was identified as one of the major “first tier” suppliers providing gold directly to Rappa after buying it from roughly nine “second tier” suppliers.

After confirming his email address to amaBhungane J R Technical MD Hugo van Loggerenberg elected not to respond to questions.

According to records contained in court documents J R Technical sold roughly 1.7 tons of gold worth around R900-million to Rappa during the lifespan of the VBS hawala. This is not to suggest that all the proceeds made its way to VBS, but illustrates the scale of the cash flow.

Yet another company feeding millions to the VBS accounts was Santec Security Services, a registered cash-in-transit company operating in the orbit of the local gold industry. Its owner Pieter Engelbrecht also elected not to respond to questions.
It is worth mentioning that both JR Technical and Santec were among 64 companies in the orbit of the gold industry that have been under investigation by the Hawks’ National and Transnational Organised Crime unit as part of an illicit gold project codenamed “Gravity”.

Another major contributor to the VBS hawala is an entity identified in bank statements as “Instant Cash Jewelry”, which is not a registered company but which likewise paid millions over an exceedingly short period of time. It paid over R360-million into the hawala.

Throughout the life of the hawala the pattern remained the same: chunks of money would arrive from funders like JR Technical and soon after get paid out again. Below is an extract showing money arriving from this funder and quickly getting paid out to one of controversial businessman Zunaid Moti’s property companies.

This does not mean that Moti is getting paid by JR Technical but rather that Moti, using the hawala, is getting paid by someone in Zimbabwe. The transaction is however being made possible by cash provided by JR Technical.

Missing link

If South African companies linked to the gold industry were funding the hawala, the question becomes: what’s in it for them?

A speculative answer is that the whole system was in reality a way to launder illegal gold smuggled from Zimbabwe for refining in South Africa. In this scenario the South African gold refiner would be “paying” for the gold by funding the hawala.

How this would work is that the hawala operators could collect for instance $100 from clients in Zimbabwe and then have to pay parties in South Africa the rand equivalent via VBS. To do that they would use the dollars to buy gold to smuggle to the refineries. The refinery gets the gold and, in exchange, fund the VBS accounts the hawala operator needs to make their rand payments – likely minus a commission.

The missing link is then the movement of the physical gold from Zimbabwe to South Africa.

Whatever the case it is clear that there was some form of transfer between the dollar collectors in Zimbabwe and the funders of the VBS hawala in South Africa.

The major users of the hawala seem to include normal companies buying goods and services from South African companies. This allowed them to conduct business while avoiding the Zimbabwe’s exchange control restrictions and bottlenecks.

These companies ranged from importers of steel to vehicles and shoes.

Moti and Mugabe

AmaBhungane published another article today, Part One of an investigation into the Moti Group’s use of complex webs of financial flows enlisting the help of shadowy intermediaries.

The Moti Group was engaged in, at the very least, what looks like irregular cross-border capital transfer.

The VBS hawala forms one part of that story although Moti and his collaborators have denied any knowledge of the VBS system.

Nonetheless, among the thousands of payments recorded in VBS statements are a set made to a number of Moti companies in late 2017 and early 2018 totalling just under R27-million. Given that VBS imploded at this point it seems reasonable to assume the channel would otherwise have continued to be used by Moti and many others.

In the next instalment of our investigation, which will be published later this week, we will show how the VBS hawala was just one channel through which Moti seemingly illicitly moved money.

Other tantalising entries in the Caydees books include a “BC Mugabe”, reflecting the initials of Robert Mugabe’s youngest son Bellarmine Chatunga Mugabe. Thirteen payments totalling just shy of R10-million were made to this individual during the tumultuous lead-up to the ouster of the elder Mugabe from power in November 2017.

At the time there were outraged news reports of Bellarmine’s extravagant lifestyle in Johannesburg.

All told the VBS hawala represents one of the many ways in which Zimbabwe has been starved of the capital its devastated economy requires, seemingly with the connivance of its political elite.

Simultaneously it shows how the broken and inadequate systems that saw VBS descend into outright criminality was seized upon by any number of opportunistic parties operating in the dark corners of the South African – and regional – economy.

The post #MotiFiles: Inside VBS’s R1.3-billion gold-fuelled “hawala” appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

On the face of it, Zunaid Moti, owner of the sprawling Moti Group of companies, had lined up a mining deal worthy of a Randlord.

Throughout 2018 the controversial businessman cobbled together a massive portfolio of lithium claims in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland East province under a new mining venture called Pulserate Investments.

The project has been intensely publicised, especially since Moti “stepped away” from his leadership position at the group his family still owns – a move spurred by his own notoriety after a stint in a German prison between 2018 and 2019 on what appeared to be trumped-up charges levelled by a business rival.

The new CEO, former director general of South Africa’s well-regarded National Treasury, Dondo Mogajane, has picked up the torch, loudly hailing the lithium plan as a “game-changer” for Zimbabwe backed by a formidable Chinese investor.

But there is a problem.

A 2018 exploration report established that the area around Pulserate’s claims is “unlikely to host [lithium-bearing] pegmatites of sufficient size or grade to be economically significant” and  concluded that “no further work is recommended in the area”.

After the Moti Group started its own exploration, the group’s own chief operations officer has been recorded stating that “there is Jack shit there – just rock”.

His colleagues have similar opined that “we know there is nothing” and even admitted that they have no qualms about losing the entire project as long as they can keep a down payment from their apparently unsuspecting investor.

One leaked recording has Moti himself telling a subordinate that “there is fuck-all there” in what appears from the context to be a clear reference to the Pulserate claims.

All these internal admissions predate, by several months, glowing paid-for features about the “African lithium powerhouse” in South African newspapers this year.

In response to questions, Moti has dismissed all of the above, saying that that not all of the claim area has been explored and that there has in fact been “positive” feedback from geologists which he cannot share due to confidentiality. (See his full response to questions posed by our partner OCCRP here).

The apparent internal conviction that the project has little value did not stop Pulserate from drawing in Chinese billionaire Pei Zhenhua and his Yibin Tianyi Lithium Industry Co.

Pei, whose personal net-worth is estimated to be around $8-billion, is a major shareholder of Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. (CATL), the largest supplier of electric vehicle batteries in the world.

According to documents contained in the #MotiFiles, a massive leak from inside the Moti Group, intense negotiations following a MOU signed on 31 March last year led to the signing of a Share Purchase Agreement on 20 May with a low-key ceremony over a video call.

Yibin Tianyi agreed to a $6-million upfront cash payment for 20% with the promise of $4-million more if initial exploration looked promising and a commitment to spend $20-million on extensive exploration if the project looked feasible. Then Yibin Tianyi also got an option to buy another 50% based on exploration results.

Pulserate was thus able to secure an upfront payment while, in the words of Moti Group inhouse lawyer Natalie Graaff, Pei’s people were busy “drilling holes for two years, if they stay that long”.

Documents also show that Moti hoped to secretly leverage this relatively modest initial payment into a far larger cash infusion with one plan involving pre-selling future receipts from Pei to commodities giant Trafigura for R1-billion.

Lastly, embarrassingly for Mogajane, Moti personally assured his investor that setting up his young son Mikaeel and “others” as the faces of the project did not mean he would relinquish involvement, but that he would be “in the background always”.

Moti now denies “vehemently” that this suggested his stepping aside was just for show. Shortly after our partner OCCRP posed questions to Moti and Pei it was reported by Bloomberg that the Chinese had decided to back-pedal and dramatically reduce their investment.

In response to questions the Chinese investor went further, saying that it “has no investment in the relevant project”, asking that its name not get mentioned. In this regard Mogajane said that it might be technically true, but that is just because the shareholding was restructured so that Yibin Tianyi’s parent company owns the shares. (See his full response here). The questions to Yibin Tianyi had however also been sent to a representative of the parent company.

As a result it is not clear to what extent Moti’s house of lithium cards has already fallen.

But first, the back story.

Land grab

Lithium is used to make the batteries powering electric cars and has in recent years rapidly become a sought-after commodity with mining companies scouring the earth for major deposits.

In Zimbabwe, one such significant discovery has been made: the Arcadia project developed by Australian mining group Prospect Resources which has recently been on-sold to China’s Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt in an eye-watering $377-million deal.

Having already cemented his place in the country’s mining industry through his African Chrome Fields (ACF), Moti in early 2018 dived head-first into lithium, hoping for similar success.

The Australians, Prospect, had one other potential project in Zimbabwe: an early-stage exploration target centred on an old abandoned mine called Good Days in Mashonaland East. The mine produced beryl in the 50s and 60s when no one was looking for lithium but there were indications that the battery-making mineral was also present.

Claims over the mine and adjacent areas were held by a local company called Barrington Resources, reportedly (and likely illegally) part-owned by the Zimbabwean minister of mining Winston Chitando.

The Australians inked a deal with Barrington in mid-2017 for an option to buy 70% of the Good Days claims after first doing some exploration in the area.

In April 2018 Moti Group’s chief geologist Barry Jones sent an email to his boss and other Moti Group executives:

“Attached is a report on a good Lithium project. The average grade is 2.99% – this is exceptionally high as a normal Lithium mine would be in the region of 0.9%. Harry Greeves is involved in a Lithium project next door (Barrington Resources) and have already pre-sold to the Chinese, they are listed on the ASX under Prospect Resources. The owner (Emmanuel

Nyanyiwa) of these claim is willing to sell / free carry. I would suggest we purchase these claims, do limited geological work and can sell them on at a substantial profit.”

Harry Greaves was an old acquaintance of Moti from previous mining deals.

One important qualification here is “next door” – the claims over the Good Days mine were seemingly not themselves available and in fact, as far as anyone knew, belonged to Barrington.

Jones was however misinformed on every other count. The supposedly exceptional grade would turn out to be an illusion based on an extremely unrepresentative sample of rocks gathered at the old Good Days mine and the project that had been “pre-sold to the Chinese” was Arcadia, not next door but in fact 140km away.

As we will see, Prospect in reality cut their losses and walked away from Good Days only months after Jones sent this glowing endorsement.

Nevertheless, the die was cast and several months of feverish deal-making ensued over the remainder of 2018 and into 2019.

Mr. Lithium

Ultimately, Moti found himself with 84 lithium claims covering nearly 10 000ha. Practically none of it had actually been explored in any meaningful way and any real value was, in the words of Moti’s own consulting geologists Minxcon entirely “conceptual”.

What this meant is that Minxcon applied the average grades of lithium mines around the world to create a hypothetical range of values for Pulserate. On the one extreme the project would be worth practically nothing. On the other end of the scale it would be world-class super-deposit.

In response to questions Minxcon geologist Maria Antoniades told us that “an informed reader will understand that the ranges imply that the estimation is of low confidence and high risk”.

Despite having next to no real data in hand, the Moti Group started shopping for an investor with what now appear to be extravagant promises. In an October 2021 meeting with his now-estranged business partner Frederick Lutzkie, Moti piled on the superlatives:

“This lithium is on the fucking surface chommie. Look at me. This is not underground. This is sommer on the fucking surface…I am serious boet. Look at this. There is nothing to be done. You go there, you pick up the material.”

Pulserate ignored the warnings from their own consultants Minxcon that it made no sense to compare their project to Prospect’s Arcadia which was 140km away and had no geological relationship to it.

Despite this, leaked documents show Pulserate had Minxcon prepare an entire presentation a few months after this email entitled “Review of Lithium Claims vs Arcadia Project”.

Simply applying the geology of Arcadia to the huge surface area of the Pulserate claims led to Moti claiming the potential “upside” was a staggering $6-billion.

Minxcon however told us that “the presentation corroborates and explains the point made in the email, i.e., that the value of the Pulserate project could not be compared directly with Arcadia because Arcadia is in a far more advanced stage of development than that of Pulserate”. (See their full response here).

In paid-for content placed in various South African newspapers in May this year following amaBhungane’s first #MotiFiles articles the Moti Group still hyped up its prospective “$1bn African lithium powerhouse”.

Up to a point Moti may very well have believed his own sales pitch. By the time he was finally reeling in his big fish investor last year the evidence suggests he must have known better.

“Jack-shit there”

Some exploration had in fact been done around Good Days by the Australians Prospect who had abandoned the site back in 2018. On request Prospect’s chief geologist Roger Tyler emailed a report he had produced to Moti Group executive Bianca Waskow on 2 September 2021.

In his report Tyler noted that there were sporadic instances of lithium-rich rock but that these were “highly zoned” and very limited in extent. They were in other words like needles in a haystack and there probably weren’t enough of them to warrant upending the haystack to begin with. “No further work is recommended in the area,” he said.

Minxcon’s conceptual desktop studies predated the disclosure of this damning geology report to the Moti Group.

However, the report came to the Moti Group’s attention long before it called on Minxcon for further presentations in January 2022, in which it asked Minxcon to do a “direct comparison” between Pulsate and Arcadia.

There is a simple reason this new information was not taken into account: “The Tyler report was not made available to Minxcon, nor was it mentioned to Minxcon. Minxcon was not aware that this report exists,” Antoniades told us.

In the course of 2022 the Moti Group seemingly independently became aware just how unpromising their lithium claims were.

A series of recordings of meetings between Moti Group executives contain unguarded discussions of this problem, laying bare the stark divergence between the negative private views and all the ongoing public hype about the supposed lithium mega-project.

In one recording from October last year, Pulserate chief operations officer Mark Beukes discusses the project with in-house legal counsel Natalie Graaff. Beukes recounted a conversation he had with Pulserate chief geologist Godfrey Chagonda:

“I said to him, listen, I’m not asking you for a preview. I’ll pay you for your opinion. I’m going to get my core results. I’d like your professional opinion.”

“He said, I’ll do it for free, there’s fuck-all there. He said, don’t ever send your cores in. Don’t waste your money. It’s not worth it, there’s nothing there.”

In the same recording former in-house lawyer Clinton van Niekerk asks Beukes whether there is anything else in the ground:

VAN NIEKERK: Still not tantalum hey?

BEUKES: There’s no tantalum

VAN NIEKERK: Did you even find any beryl, man? Turn it into an emerald mine there. There’s supposed to be emeralds in Good Days.

BEUKES: There’s jack shit there, just rock.

Later on Beukes explained to his colleagues the problem of “highly zoned” deposits that had been raised in the geological report that caused the Australian Prospect Resources to leave the area.

“You know what the reality is. Good Days is…It’s a nugget…You can’t drill if it’s such a small seam and you’re going to miss, miss, miss, I mean, fuck it, it’s not worth mining.”

Yet another recording from September 2022, of Moti instructing a subordinate Wiid Rossouw to negotiate to reduce the asking price for a new set of claims unrelated to the Pulserate project, seemingly includes him complaining about how they previously bought claims containing “fuck-all”. The reference to “10 000 hectares” identifies it as Pulserate.

MOTI: Tell them to go fuck themselves. They can go mine it themselves, okay. Six hundred thousand dollars…

ROSSOUW: Zunaid, can we offer them 300?

MOTI: For what would you, we don’t even know what’s there

ROSSOUW: Okay

MOTI: you’re just assuming that you’ve got shit there again. We bought a ten thousand hectare reserve on the basis that

ROSSOUW: Ja, ja

MOTI: There’s fuck-all there.

In a 23 August recording Graaff is captured saying that losing Pulserate to Yibin Tianyi altogether in terms of a guarantee agreement they signed would not be a loss at all:

“I would say he [Pei] can have Pulserate. We don’t care. You know, because we know there is nothing there…”

In response to questions, and being confronted with these recordings, Moti did not challenge their authenticity but dismissed them as irrelevant.

“A material part of the transaction with Tianyi was related to a large scale exploration taking place over a period of two years…Until such a time as these exploration activities were completed, nobody could truly make any objective assessment of the value of Pulserate’s claims.”

He further referred to “numerous meetings and site reports where the geological team provided positive feedback on their progress and the prospects of the project”.

“I am not at liberty to share any of these with you as they are subject to confidentiality…The Moti Group continues to believe in the Pulserate Project, and is continuing its exploration efforts and doing the necessary test work required to develop its project.”

Likewise, Mogajane separately dismissed the recordings saying “there can be no objective opinion as to the value or potential of our Lithium resource until the exploration activities  have been completed by experts in this field. This is the very purpose of the exploration phase. It has always been clear that, of the 10 000 hectare reserve, there would be sections that would contain very little to no Lithium”.

“That has always been a discussion point between various executives of the Moti Group. This was also discussed in detail with CATL in numerous meetings”

In the meantime Moti ran into another roadblock. Despite the vast expanse of his claims the entire deal with the Chinese seemed to ride on one single small corner of the land – the old Good Days mine itself. But the problem was, someone else claimed to own it and that someone was allegedly the Zimbabwean minister of mining.

The minister and the vice-president

Back when the Australians Prospect were exploring the area they did so in terms of a deal with a company called Barrington Resources, which was as far as anyone knew the actual owner of mining claims covering the Good Days mine.

Official mining maps and also those published by Prospect showed Moti’s closest claim, dubbed Good Days K, only bordering the Barrington claims. The Chinese did not miss the discrepancy and Pei’s due diligence team drilled Moti’s team about it mercilessly.

“We are mostly concerned about the potential overlapping of mining claims for Good Days area with competing mining claims held by certain third parties,” read a list of “key issues” as the Share Purchase Agreement was being finalised.

Moti’s version was that it “appears from all published material by Prospect that they were [mistakenly] labouring under the impression that they owned Good Days K”.

To hopefully settle the matter, on 21 April last year, Pulserate procured a letter from the provincial office of the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development seemingly confirming the coordinates of Good Days K – coordinates encompassing the mine.

Despite the confident assurances the leaks suggest the Moti Group was fretting.

On 23 August 2022 top Moti executives Salim Bobat, Wiid Rossouw, Natalie Graaff, and Van Niekerk met at the Moti Group’s headquarters in Parkmore, Johannesburg. It appears from a recording of the meeting that the Moti Group was already planning ahead for when their claim to the mine gets challenged.

BOBAT: Two things can happen. Is it, will they ask for the $6 million back, if that is the case…

GRAAFF: No. Then he must tell them, ‘Come, let us jointly sue the ministry of mines. It is their fault.

BOBAT: Now it is… Remember that’s the rush. The $6 million.

GRAAFF: And whatever they spent to date on the drilling.

BOBAT: No, they won’t have that. Let’s first find out about this. By the time they get to it you are going to know about that.

GRAAFF: In their minds they think we own that thing.

BOBAT: But the whole problem is, our problem is…we must find a way to keep the $6-million

ROSSOUW: So once we get the 6 million, we are blowing up

Responding to questions Moti said that this recording must be seen in its proper context: “Moti Group took the full legal risk for any issues with the coordinates of the Good Days K claim (and all the other claims for that matter) by way of warranties contained in the agreements. The Moti Group would continuously assess its legal and commercial options in respect of this matter, debating potential outcomes amongst its team members and legal advisors.”

The Moti team need not have worried.

Barrington of course objected to what, in their view, amounted to being dispossessed of their claim and they took the matter to the Zimbabwe high court in December 2022.

According to affidavits Barrington had called on the provincial director of mining Tendai Kashiri to adjudicate the supposedly overlapping claims. Moti’s people however failed to pitch up for two scheduled meetings.

Instead, Moti Group CEO Dondo Mogajane went over the entire ministry of mining’s head and wrote to the Vice-president of Zimbabwe, known Moti ally Constantino Chiwenga. Their cosy relationship was canvassed in a previous #MotiFiles exposé. In the “highly confidential” letter Mogajane laid into Barrington and perhaps most importantly hinted darkly at the rival being owned by – then still unnamed – “individuals in the Zimbabwean government”. In Zimbabwe it is illegal for an official involved in regulating mining to have an interest in a mining project.

In court Barrington levelled accusations of forgery and fraud against Pulserate, specifically alleging that it had moved the coordinates of Good Days K with the connivance of a mining official.

Moti however had a trump card, alluded to in the letter to the Vice-president.

In court Pulserate outed mining minister Winston Chitando as the alleged owner of Barrington and claimed his “nefarious and greedy conduct” underpinned an attempt to “annex the mining claims in question”.

In Zimbabwe, playing such a card against the mining minister would be a high risk strategy, unless of course the letter to the Vice President had paved the way.

In any case, it was successful. The court found not only was it illegal for the mining minister to own a mining claim, but Barrington could not even convince the judge that its own claim was legitimate.

The main problem was that Barrington claimed to have bought its Good Days claims in 2012 but the company was only registered in 2013 and could not produce any kind of pre-incorporation contract as required. The acquisition of the claims was consequently a “nullity in law”, wrote judge Mutevedzi in a July ruling. This meant that Pulserate never had to defend itself against any of the factual allegations about faking coordinates and colluding with officials. By all appearances Moti is completely in the clear.

From $6-million to $76-million

The efforts to secure the Good Days mine were obviously necessary to keep the Chinese interested, but in the larger context of the Moti Group’s operations Pei’s upfront payment of $6-million was not an astronomical amount of money.

If, contrary to Moti’s denials, the internal consensus really was that there was “jack shit there” – which the Chinese would likely find out soon enough – why go to so much trouble to reel them in?

Leaked documents suggest however that Moti hoped for a much more dramatic and immediate bonanza.

One day after securing Pei’s signature on the Pulserate MOU, on 1 April last year, Moti was pitching a back-to-back agreement with commodities trading behemoth Trafigura.

According to a proposal contained in the leaked #MotiFiles the idea was to leverage the Pei deal into an instant cash bonanza of $70-million (R1-billion) irrespective of whether the mining project ultimately succeeded.

Moti proposed the following: Trafigura would provide Moti with the $70-million cash and several months down the line, when further payments from Pei were theoretically due, Trafigura would get paid back $100-million – an extremely generous return on investment of 43%.

However, in the event of the lithium project failing, Trafigura would not have any recourse against Moti himself but rather have to settle for 20% of a platinum project in Rustenburg, South Africa, which was offered as security.

The platinum project Kilken is itself mired in disputes between Moti Group shareholders and another shareholder, Frederick Lutzkie.

In response to questions Moti said that this was just a conceptual discussion document and. was never implemented in any form. It does however show how Moti hoped to capitalise on the lithium project whether it actually ever came to anything or not.

As for the Chinese, it seems they have lost faith in Moti, and acted even before waiting for the recent positive outcome of the court case around Good Days K.

In response to questions Yibin Tianyi said on 13 July “Tianyi has no investment in the relevant project and thus please do not name Tianyi in your publication” without offering any further explanation. On 19 July Bloomberg reported that the Chinese investor had cut its initial investment to 10% rather than 20%.

“In the background always”

The leaked #MotiFiles suggest that the Moti Group’s new CEO Mogajane and executive director, Moti’s son Mikaeel, are mere figureheads.

In March this year Zunaid Moti announced that he would be “stepping away” from leadership of the sprawling group bearing his name, citing the damage being done by his reputation to the company. He would henceforth concentrate on the group’s major subsidiary African Chrome Fields, read a press release.

In Moti’s stead Mogajane would take over as CEO, bringing with him a clean record and the glow of having sat at the top of an unusually well-regarded state institution, National Treasury.

During the negotiations with Pei around Pulserate Moti however wrote the Chinese billionaire a personal letter dated 29 March 2022 which is contained in the leak. In it Moti reassured the investor that “my son and others will be the front for the transaction to protect your reputation and to make the deal more sellable in China, I am in the background always”.

With regards to his son, Moti rejects this reading outright, saying that “the assumption that Mikaeel’s succession of myself is merely cosmetic is vehemently denied”.

In one recent paid-for article Mikaeel is referred to as a “business prodigy”.

With regards to Mogajane, Moti suggests that he could not be the “others” being referred to because, although he was already negotiating with Mogajane to take the helm, the letter predates the decision to employ him:

“At the time that the Moti Group entered into the transaction with Tianyi, I was already contemplating stepping down from the operations because of the impact that negative media coverage in relation to me personally was having on the group. At this stage I was already in discussions with Dondo Mogajane to join the group as the CEO. Accordingly, this letter predates the announcement that I would be stepping down formally in March 2023 after completing a lengthy hand over period during which time Mogajane was familiarizing himself with the group on a practical level.” Ironically this response seemingly supports rather than refutes the notion that Moti may have had the soon-to-be-appointed Mogajane in mind when he wrote to Pei.

The post #MotiFiles: Zunaid Moti’s grand lithium “sting” appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

Our deponent, Dewald van Rensburg, was stuck in Cape Town, unable to get to the airport because a business mafia was using street violence to bolster its dispute with the City of Cape Town. Our lawyers’ Cape Town office was closed for the same reason.

Meanwhile Moti was sponsoring and leading a nauseating sweetheart media tour to what is effectively a minor mafia state, Zimbabwe, where the Mnangagwa regime, like its predecessor, is preparing to steal an election – again.

The media invite from Moti’s Zimbabwean cash cow, African Chrome Fields (ACF) made it clear the tour from 7-12 August was mainly a free joyride.

It promised that “ACF will take care of all your needs during the trip which will include your travel, accommodation, meals during the trip and more” and that the itinerary would include “Victoria Falls, Safaris, Borrowdale Village, Markets, Lunch with ministers, ACF mine and school, State house visit and more!”

In case there was any doubt, it noted that the tour was “fully supported by the Government of Zimbabwe,” which dubbed the junket “The True Zimbabwe Tour”.

At the gala dinner hosted by the Zimbabwean minister of information the symbiotic relationship between Moti and the Zimbabwe regime was on full display.

Hitching his pony to Zanu-PF’s trusty anti-Western propaganda wagon, Moti told the assembled guests and hired celebrities (including Pearl Thusi, Sonia Mbele, and Sello Maake Ka-Ncube) that “it is not right that the West create the impressions and the innuendos that Zimbabwe is a failed country, a failed state.”

Later he used his social media channels to challenge people to invest in Zimbabwe, saying, “I love doing business down there because things get done.”

Ironically, it is amaBhungane’s exposés of just how he gets things done in Zimbabwe that Moti is objecting to in his Concourt filing.

The Moti Group’s application for direct access to the Constitutional Court is an audacious attempt to resurrect the case thrown out by Gauteng deputy judge president Roland Sutherland (read the full judgment here).

Sutherland ruled the Moti Group had committed a “most egregious abuse” of the court process in seeking and obtaining a gag order on an urgent, ex-parte, in-camera basis – in other words, without us knowing a thing about it.

When amaBhungane sought to be heard for the first time in front of Sutherland, the Moti Group attempted to bolster its original case on which the gag order was granted.

Moti’s lawyers attempted to shift their argument from a case based on ownership of the Moti Group documents leaked to us, to a new case based on a constitutional claim to privacy. 

Sutherland said this too was an abuse.

“An applicant cannot make out a better case for the ex parte order than the case it put before the court when the order was granted. It was for this reason that an attempt by [the Moti Group] to bring a counterclaim… was dismissed by me out of hand. It was irregular and yet another abuse of the process.”

The Moti Group is now attempting to re-run this case at the Constitutional Court, without even the courtesy of an application for leave from Sutherland.

Moti’s lawyers have probably told him that it’s a very long shot (read our opposing affidavit here) but that’s not the point.

Moti has money to burn to prop up his reputation, and to force us to divert scarce resources from doing our jobs to fighting expensive court battles – as he explained here, noting in June already, “You wanna fight with us, and pick a fight with us with that type of Tom [cash]? I don’t know about that.”

We may win against Moti this time because of his shockingly ill-judged founding case, but he will come again – or somebody else will.

Moti has exposed a nasty truth about the state of our media: it is weak and the number of people with the independence, skills, professionalism and ethics to justifiably call themselves journalists is shrinking and under pressure.

Moti has shown that with money, a PR company and a slick social media campaign, you can bypass the media you can’t buy off. He’s also shown that when an aggressive legal strategy is backed by such a propaganda onslaught, you can win (as he did in the first round) and it hardly matters that you may lose in the end.

Others are only too ready to get stuck in to widen the breach Moti has exposed, as the ‘Alex Mafia’ case decided last week shows (read the judgment here).

That’s why it is so important for South Africans to offer support in one way or another to genuine independent journalism and journalists – not just amaBhungane (though you can catch our fund-raising video here) – but everyone who upholds the constitutional duty to shine a light in dark corners and hold power to account.

The post Moti and the media: amaBhungane’s fight for the future appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

Despite the exceptionally clear and comprehensive judgment, the Moti Group’s spokesperson and attorney continue to misrepresent the nature of the case and the effect of the judgment in their media appearances.

This risks contributing to an incorrect perception of the case, amaBhungane’s interests and the Moti Group’s motivations. It also undermines the integrity of the media and the courts.

This is a response to the main points the Moti Group has raised.

1. The ex parte process is a process available in law

AmaBhungane has never denied that the ex parte procedure is one provided for in law; we have consistently maintained that it is not appropriate in this case. Judge Sutherland confirmed this:

“The facts demonstrate an egregious example of the abuse of the ex parte procedure”

“the interaction between the legal representatives over this period and the express caution against taking an order behind [amaBhungane’s] back are material factors why any legal proceedings to determine the rights and wrongs of the parties’ respective well-known stances could not justifiably have been brought ex parte. The decision to do so was an abuse of process. The courts cannot tolerate abuse of the process.”

2. AmaBhungane is basing their reporting on “stolen” documents, to which they are not entitled to have access and are not legally entitled 

The characterization of the documents as “stolen” has been the Moti Group’s main argument throughout the legal process and, even before that, in their legal team’s engagement with amaBhungane’s attorneys. 

Judge Sutherland stated, unequivocably, that the nature of the documents is irrelevant to amaBhungane’s possession of them. He said:

“The [Moti Group] contend[s] that [amaBhungane] are, at best for them, accomplices, after the fact, to theft. This belief is incorrect.” (emphasis added)

The Judge accepted that there is a crime of possession of stolen property – but definitely rejected the argument that it could be applied to journalists in possession of documents that may have originally been obtained unlawfully. He said:

“Contraband information in the hands of a journalist is certainly not in such a category [as, for example, uncut diamonds or unwrought gold]; on the contrary, there is overwhelming support for such activity being a positive and necessary good in society. In contemporary South African society there could be a cogent argument advanced that such activity is an essential good without which our country cannot crawl out of the corrupt morass in which we find ourselves”.

The Judge questioned why criminalising the media’s possession of unlawfully-obtained information could be contemplated:

“On what grounds would it [be] thought useful to society that a journalist who is granted access to a digital data file by a person not authorized to do so, i.e. a thief, be also committing the crime of theft?”

It is important to maintain the distinction between the civil case brought by the Moti Group against amaBhungane and the criminal charges the Moti Group laid against its former employee, Clinton van Niekerk. There are problems with the Moti Group’s reliance on the criminal case:

• Although the Moti Group states that it is known that van Niekerk provided amaBhungane with the documents, this has never been confirmed or accepted by amaBhungane: we have not and will not reveal the identity of our sources.
  
  
• Van Niekerk has not been found guilty of theft, and so it is imprecise to refer to the documents as “stolen”
  
  
• No criminal charges have been laid against amaBhungane or its journalists.

The only possible criminal charge of theft that could be brought against amaBhungane would be under the Cyber Crimes Act. Judge Sutherland noted that this piece of legislation could not be used: 

“In the reconsideration hearing, an attempt was made to suggest that the Cyber Crimes Act 19 of 2020 which declares the crime of theft to encompass not only the misappropriation of data but also the possession of data helped to overcome the proposition upheld in WasteTech [that copies of information could not be considered property, and so not susceptible to theft] … In my view, this text does not assist. The text suggests that possession must be unlawful possession independently of knowledge of its being wrongfully procured.”

AmaBhungane is not in unlawful possession of any document. 

3. The case was decided on technicalities

The Moti Group maintain that the case was decided on technicalities, and not the merits of the case, and so the constitutional questions of their right to privacy and the limits of media freedom and the right to freedom of expression were not determined.

This is disingenuous. It is true that Judge Sutherland decided the case on a technical ground, in that he ruled that the ex parte order obtained by the Moti Group should not have been granted. But this was precisely because of the Moti Group’s abuse of process. Judge Sutherland mentioned “abuse of process” nine times in the judgment, in finding that the Moti Group was not entitled to bring an application against amaBhungane on an ex parte basis and that they were not entitled to seek to strengthen their initial case at a later stage.

“The elephant in this case is not press freedom or a violation of privacy. Rather, it is a most egregious abuse of the process of court. It is manifest that the order granted on 1 June should never have been sought ex parte, still less granted. There is not a smidgeon of justification for it being brought ex parte.”

AmBhungane has characterized this case as a SLAPP suit – strategic litigation against public participation. One characteristic of a SLAPP suit is an abuse of the court process as a strategy to silence the media through intimidation or bankruptcy. 

The Moti Group’s insistence that this case was “decided on technicalities” evades their role in forcing the Judge to determine the matter on the technicalities, and fails to acknowledge the finding that they abused the court process.

More importantly, although Judge Sutherland acknowledged that it “could be argued it is unnecessary” to address the merits of the case, he nevertheless did so. Judge Sutherland made several important pronouncements on the importance of the right to freedom of expression and the necessary protections for the media:

In respect of a journalist’s obligation to protect the confidentiality of a source: “The resistance to disgorgement of information on the ground of protecting a source is functional and not optional to the work-process of investigative journalism” 

In respect of a court prohibiting the publication of an article before that article has been published: “an aspect seemingly ignored in the application is the well-established norm against pre-publication restraints on the media. This norm does not articulate an absolute prohibition, but rather, that such an order should be made only where the public interest is not served by publication”. 

“A South African court shall not shut the voice of the media unless the fact-specific circumstances convincingly demonstrate that the public interest is not served by such publication. This is likely to be rare.” 

4. The Moti Group is entitled to protection of its right to privacy, and to retain control of confidential documents

Judge Sutherland noted that the case involves a balance of the rights to privacy and freedom of expression: “The function of the courts in holding an appropriate balance between the rights of privacy and confidentiality in private matters, on the one hand, and the public interest in the free flow of news and especially news exposing skulduggery, on the other, is a well-traversed terrain”.  

Judge Sutherland dismissed the Moti Group’s contention that the documents were confidential: 

• “the first question that arises is whether the information in the data files is indeed ‘confidential’? The [Moti Group’s] mere say so is unhelpful in establishing that proposition.” 
  
  
• “The relevant question is whether the attribute of confidentiality was lost as a result of the leak? The decision in SABC v AVUSA is direct authority for the proposition that there is a forfeiture of confidentiality upon the information being leaked to the world at large”

5) Zunaid Moti’s gratuitous attack on amaBhungane and Sam Sole

Zunaid Moti has made a scurrilous claim relating to amaBhungane’s former chair, stating that amaB and Sam “protect sexual predators”.  

The facts are as follows:

• Sam was unaware of any allegations of impropriety against our former chair until a news report on 14 June indicated Tawana Kupe was resigning as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Pretoria before the end of his contract, after having been cleared of allegations of sexual harassment.
  
  
• In discussion with Kupe, the former chair did not provide any additional information about the allegations and although he had been “cleared” we considered it appropriate that he step down at our next board meeting, which was due in August.
  
  
• On Saturday 24 June, a new report revealed that he was found guilty of sexual harassment in 2016 while at WITS and issued with a final warning. Kupe had not disclosed this to us and the Wits documents were sealed. Within an hour Sam wrote to him asking him to submit his resignation letter immediately.
  
  
• Our independent non-executive board members receive no remuneration for their board service and are not involved at all in the management of amaBhungane or its editorial decisions. 
  
  
• The board meets virtually and its role is restricted to exercising oversight over compliance issues, such as budgets, spending above a certain threshold and our annual financial statements and annual narrative report.       

The post Countering the Moti Group’s misrepresentations – a summary for those following and covering the story. appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

Sutherland did not mince his words calling the Moti Group’s interdict a “most egregious abuse” of the court process.

“[T]he order granted on 1 June should never have been sought ex parte, still less granted. There is not a smidgeon of justification for it being brought ex parte.”

Sutherland noted that amaBhungane had given an undertaking to preserve the thousands of documents that make up the #MotiFiles pending any open legal challenge to our right to have it and use it.

He also noted the explicit warning given by our lawyers that any ex parte approach to a court (ie without hearing our side) would be unlawful.

Despite this, the Moti Group approached the court in secret, alleging that amaBhungane might destroy the documents if they were given prior warning of the case.

But why, Sutherland questioned, would any journalist destroy “the very evidence necessary to justify” the articles they had published?

He added, “Moreover, the interaction between the legal representatives over this period and the express caution against taking an order behind the respondents back are material factors why any legal proceedings … could not justifiably have been brought ex parte. The decision to do was an abuse of the process.”

Not only that, but when amaBhungane sought to vindicate its rights and be heard for the first time in front of Sutherland, the Moti Group attempted to bolster its original case on which the gag order was granted. Sutherland said this too was an abuse of process.

“To belabour the point – an applicant cannot make out a better case for the ex parte order than the case it put before the court when the order was granted. It was for this reason that an attempt by [the Moti Group] to bring a counterclaim to seek further relief was dismissed by me out of hand. It was irregular and yet another abuse of the process.”

Sutherland did not only dismiss the Moti Group’s underhanded action on technical grounds. He examined the core arguments raised by the Moti Group and found them wanting.

In doing so he reaffirmed some of the key principles of media freedom, and delivered a rebuke of the Moti Group’s unrelenting propaganda.

The ‘return’ of the data

Sutherland noted that the first point of contestation was whether amaBhungane should be compelled to ‘return’ the ‘stolen’ Moti Group documents. For months the Moti Group has argued that amaBhungane were “accomplices, after the fact, to theft”.

“This belief is incorrect,” Sutherland ruled.

Being in possession of leaked information was not the same as being in possession of stolen goods, he argued: “Contraband information in the hands of a journalist is certainly not in such a category; on the contrary, there is overwhelming support for such activity being a positive and necessary good in society.

In contemporary South African society there could be a cogent argument advanced that such activity is an essential good without which our country cannot crawl out of the corrupt morass in which we find ourselves.”

On source protection, he was equally clear: “The resistance to disgorgement of information on the ground of protecting a source is functional and not optional to the work-process of investigative journalism. This conduct is not mala fide but is rooted in a norm both practical and ethical.”

The publication of confidential information

The second point of contestation was whether amaBhungane should be interdicted from publishing more articles using the Moti Group’s data.

Sutherland said the Constitution required that a South African court “shall not shut the mouth of the media unless the fact-specific circumstances convincingly demonstrate that the public interest is not served by such publication”.

In this instance, he said, “no cogent case has been made out to interdict the respondents from publishing articles which refer to the data files provided to them”.

He pointed out that the Moti could use their right or reply, or sue for unlawful defamation. But that “prior restraint” of the media – or a gagging order – was not justified.

So where to from here?

Worryingly, the Moti Group’s chief executive Dondo Mogajane went on Radio 702 yesterday evening to declare that this was only the first round in the legal battle.

Attempting to spin the judgement in its favour, he told Bruce Whitfield the Moti Group had not sought a gagging order.

Fact: Under the now-overturned interdict, we were not allowed to publish from the documents, or even access the documents. This, the judge said, amounted to prior restraint which is a gagging order.

Bizarrely, Mogajane also claimed that the Moti Group “did not go behind closed doors”.

Fact: The original interdict was obtained ex-parte and in camera. That means we were not told about the court hearing, we weren’t given an opportunity to respond in court, and every other member of the public was barred from attending. That is the very definition of behind closed doors.

Mogajane tried to justify the Moti Group’s actions, saying an ex-parte application is “allowed in law”

Fact: The judge used the phrase “abuse of court process” nine times in the 33-page judgement. Ex-parte applications are allowed only in the most extreme circumstances and their case in no way met that bar.

He finished by saying that “if anything is found untoward, the media should take us on.”

On this point, at least, we agree: we plan to continue now that our hands have been untied.

No complacency

What this whole saga has demonstrated is that our courts are vulnerable to a Blitzkrieg offence – not just to a Stalingrad defence.

And our media is just as vulnerable.

Moti has been able to procure himself an enormous level of access and spin – which, even where it is not paid for, simply barges over the weak ethical and professional barriers that much of our media maintain.

Moti has given every indication that he’s not going to back down.

Amabhungane will need to bolster its financial resources to resist this onslaught.

The courts – along with scores of amaBhungane supporters – have stood up for the right and proper functioning of the media in a democratic society.

But the media more broadly needs to introspect about whether it has the will, capacity and professionalism to do justice to the faith that Judge Sutherland and our country have placed in us. 

At all levels we need to show every day that we are deserving of the extraordinary trust and protection extended to us.

The post Victory! A massive vindication for amaBhungane and journalism appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

How did we get here? What is the case all about? Why is investigative journalism under threat if the Moti interdict stands?

To get a sense of the stakes, here are some useful summaries by AmaBhungane’s in-house lawyer Caroline James of the arguments being presented by the various parties:

• amaBhungane’s heads of argument
  
  
• Corruption Watch’s heads of argument
  
  
• South African National Editors Form, Media Monitoring Africa and the Campaign for Free Expression heads of argument
  
  
• Moti’s heads of argument

Watch the court livestream

Letter of support from Defend Our Democracy

Supporting legal documents

• 230606 Notice ito Rule 16A (digital court stamp)
  
  
• 230609_DVR Supplementary Affidavit (signed)
  
  
• 230615_Mazetti Replying Affidavit with Counter Application
  
  
• 230615_Mazetti Rule 16A
  
  
• 230620_Corruption Watch HoA
  
  
• 230620_DVR Affidavit in Response to the ”Counter-Application”
  
  
• 230620_SANEF-MMA-CFE HoA
  
  
• 230623 Respondents’ heads of argument (reconsideration and anticipation)
  
  
• 230623 Respondents’ Heads of Argument on the Counter-Application

The post HIGH COURT BATTLE: Moti Group vs amaBhungane appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, marks a significant battle in the ongoing public war being waged against amaBhungane by the Moti Group and Zunaid Moti personally.

The stakes are high.

This war is potentially existential for amaBhungane – and has implications for the survival of public interest journalism in South Africa.

This case goes to the heart of the right to know. 

It concerns a court order which, if confirmed, will effectively extinguish the right of journalists to receive and impart public interest information that is leaked by confidential sources.

The question before the High Court is whether it is intrinsically unlawful for journalists to receive, retain and preserve leaked information and to publish from it in the public interest. 

We submit that it clearly is not unlawful.

In fact, these duties are fundamental to journalism, to the protection of sources and to the free flow of information.

The story so far

To recap:

• AmaB published a series of articles on Zunaid Moti and The Moti Group that revealed Moti’s efforts to ingratiate himself with Zimbabwe’s political elites, and exposed suspicious financial flows via the Moti Group’s operations in Zimbabwe, as well as a secret loan to an Investec employee tasked with limiting the bank’s exposure to the Moti Group’s ballooning debt.

• Partly as a result of these hard-hitting exposés, but also, we suspect, because of what we have yet to publish, we are in the thick of a multi-pronged campaign to silence us.

• Moti and his group are fighting on multiple channels: using a public charm offensive, matched with an aggressive civil legal strategy and threats the journalists may be pursued criminally, both here and in Zimbabwe.

• On the legal offensive, the Moti Group on 1 June obtained an order on an urgent, ex parte and in camera basis (meaning it was held in secret without the judge hearing our version) containing a final interdict directing us to “return” our source material and an interim interdict restraining us from reporting on such material or even “utilising” it.

• On 3 June amaB went to court and a variation of the draconian order was issued, which meant we did not have to return the documents, but the gag remained until we had a chance to challenge the outcome of the original secret hearing. This article by the Committee to Protect Journalists summarises the events to date here, and our own here.

• We return to court tomorrow, 27 June 2023, to set aside the Moti Group’s unprecedented gag order against the #MotiFiles – but also to vindicate the rights of all journalists to receive leaks, and to manage and publish information from them professionally in the public interest without jeopardising sources.

Journalism is not a crime

The campaign being pursued by the Moti Group is premised on amaBhungane being in possession of “stolen documents” and seeks to portray the young man Moti accuses of leaking them – Clinton van Niekerk – as a “thief” not a whistleblower.

This characterisation is a fig-leaf for a desperate effort to stop any more of the story coming out, using lawyers and the courts in an attempt to gag us and to force us to reveal confidentially acquired documents and sources.

It is being waged via a slick social media campaign by Zunaid Moti who, since the scandal broke, has restyled himself as an “influencer” complete with luxury cars, cigars and a self-serving promotion of his advice and mentorship, which is supposed to recast the controversial businessman in a charitable light.

It is being waged via an expensive public relations campaign, with paid articles, a stream of press releases and an influence operation which has gone so far as to distribute (and presumably solicit) letters of support from entities such as police and prisons union Popcru and the Black Business Council.

The latest tack is to get these entities and other sympathetic commentators to condemn amaBhungane and our reporting on the Moti Group as having an anti-Black agenda, driven by nefarious local and foreign sponsors.

It has also persuaded them to chime in on the Moti Group’s repeated refrain that the leaked documents on which some of our reporting is based are “stolen” and “confidential” and therefore should be out of bounds to us.

This isn’t just an amaBhungane issue

Moti’s argument would essentially outlaw all leaks-based journalism – or make it practically impossible.

Every “leaker” by definition commits a transgression and if Moti succeeds in putting the lid on this one then so can everyone else – from governments to corporations to other powerful individuals.

The arguments Moti is making would apply to everything from the Pentagon Papers to the #GuptaLeaks. It would result in pre-publication censorship and shift the focus from the public interest to whether the journalist is guilty of violating confidentiality.

Moti was initially asking for two things.

First, he wanted amaBhungane to stop reporting on him using leaked documents.

Second, he wanted us to “return” everything – effectively depriving us of further access and allowing him to take an inventory, analyse the files and figure out how we got access to the documents and from whom.

The danger to sources is obvious – as is the motivation: to try to shut down the story – or at least get ahead of it.

Since this court case began Moti’s team have been forced to pivot somewhat – but what they now demand is really no better.

Among a range of demands, they want the court to rule that their privacy rights imply there should be a court-managed disclosure and sifting process prior to publication.

This would mean checking every single document to decide – in isolation – whether it is confidential or meets (on its own) the test of public interest disclosure.

Moreover, this prior classification regime will shatter the assurance of confidentiality that journalists give to their sources and potential sources.

That is anathema to the freedom of the media.

Both for source protection reasons and for the practical integrity of the process, leaks are indivisible.

That is because, by definition, large data sets contain much information that is irrelevant.

But the relevance of individual documents to legitimate public interest issues is never certain and may change over the course of an investigation. As we saw from the GuptaLeaks, small details such as a calendar entry can provide key clues or vital corroboration. 

In any event, the extensive nature of data leaks means that a ‘manual’ checking process is often practically impossible.

Moti is arguing that source protection should take a back seat and that journalists cannot be trusted to judge what is and what is not in the public interest.

Solidarity

That stance represents a broad threat to investigative journalism and to whistleblowing – so much so that the South African National Editors Forum, Media Monitoring Africa, Campaign for Free Expression jointly and Corruption Watch independently have added their arguments as amicus curiae (friends of the court) to our case.

Corruption Watch said in their written submissions, “The outcome of this application will have far-reaching consequences… The roles played by corruption whistle-blowers and the media in exposing corruption, fostering transparency and accountability, and protecting the victims of corruption against wrongdoing are also implicated.”

They argued this meant that the public interest in the integrity of investigative journalism clearly outweighed the Moti Group’s alleged  “proprietary” interest in the leaked documents.

The media organisations said in their submission, “Journalism that is limited to information that governments and corporations voluntarily supply is little better than a public relations exercise… Where confidential information reveals illegal, unethical behaviour, journalists have not only a right, but a duty to publish it… Corporations have no right in a democracy to object to publication of embarrassing information merely because they intended that information to be confidential.”

As the Moti Group’s campaign against amaBhungane has intensified and the implications for media more broadly became evident, a shared sense of solidarity has emerged.

As journalism became the protagonist of the story, our peers in the field have put the spotlight on this case and highlighted the chilling implications for media, access to information, freedom of expression, and ultimately democracy.

These include GroundUp, News24, The Sentry, Media Monitoring Africa, The Daily Maverick.

Others have issued statements of solidarity and shared public messages of support. These include The Committee to Protect Journalists, Open Secrets, IFEX and Reporters Sans Frontiers.

All of these have given strength to our arm.

AmaB readers and supporters have responded with continued generosity and confidence in our work. 

We value this commitment to public interest journalism. We need public support and vigilance to continue the work of digging dung, fertilising democracy.

The post Comment: Zunaid Moti’s war on amaBhungane and on journalism appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

AmaBhungane welcomes the court order issued at midday today undoing the worst aspects of the order obtained against us by the Moti Group in a secret court hearing on Thursday.

The urgent court judge said the order previously issued in our absence by Judge John Holland-Muter should never have been granted.

Today’s variation of that order, reached by agreement, means that amaBhungane will no longer be required to hand over documents in its possession, which the Moti Group claims belong to them and are stolen documents.

Amabhungane was seriously concerned about the damage to source protection that such a handover would entail.

On Friday morning already we had made an offer to preserve the documents pending the proper ventilation of the matter in court. This was rejected by the Moti Group.

The variation order effectively implements the offer we made yesterday – which we made to ensure we would not have to hand over documents tonight, as required by the court order. While we are disappointed that the gag order issued against us – unjustifiably and abusively in our view – remains in place for now, we will fight this in due course and believe today’s variation was necessary to protect our sources.

Last night journalists from the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism learnt that they had been gagged by a secret court application and ruling.

The Moti Group approached the Johannesburg High Court on Tuesday requesting an urgent interdict and demanding the immediate return of thousands of ‘leaked’ documents.

Normally, journalists would be given an opportunity to argue their case, but the application was brought ex-parte and heard in-camera, meaning that they were not even aware of the application until after Judge John Holland-Muter had made his ruling.

The interim interdict, granted on Thursday, gives amaBhungane and its journalists 48 hours to return any documents belonging to the Moti Group. It also prevents amaBhungane from publishing any new articles based on the documents until October, when the journalists will finally have a chance to plead their case.

The Moti Group, and its founder Zunaid Moti, have been scrambling to contain a leak of damaging information since the end of last year after a former employee, Clinton van Niekerk, allegedly downloaded thousands of company documents before resigning from the company.

Van Niekerk is understood to be in witness protection.

In an affidavit, former Treasury director-general Dondo Mogajane – now the chief executive of the Moti Group – told the court that “in the wrong hands, [the documents] will cause the Moti Group reputational damage if a false narrative based on the stolen documents is advanced, which is currently the case”.

He goes on to accuse amaBhungane of having a “vendetta against the Moti Group” and “publishing a series [of] highly distorted inaccurate and defamatory reports”, a reference to the #MotiFiles investigations that amaBhungane began publishing in April.

Neither Moti nor his company has officially challenged the articles through either the courts or the Press Ombud, but instead have launched a public relations blitzkrieg – using Tiktok and paid articles – to counter the fallout.

But recently, the Moti Group has switched from trying to spin the story to shut it down completely.

The fake researcher

Moti, through his lawyer Ulrich Roux, has previously threatened amaBhungane journalists with criminal charges what he claims is complicity in the “theft” of the Moti Group’s internal documents.

In January, Van Niekerk, the former employee turned whistleblower, was arrested at Durban’s King Shaka International Airport for “theft of information”.

Van Niekerk was taken to Johannesburg by police from Sandton police station despite a court order preventing his removal. He was released two days later when a magistrate struck the case from the roll following a Durban high court decision setting aside the arrest warrant.

Moti and his associates, including prominent forensic investigator Paul O’Sullivan, have subsequently attempted to paint amaBhungane’s journalists as accessories to crime.

After amaBhungane and The Sentry published an exposé on Moti’s ties to Zimbabwe’s political elites and suspicious financial flows via the Moti Group’s operations in Zimbabwe, Moti claimed on social media that he was going to investigate amaBhungane and its managing partner Sam Sole.

“It seems that because elections are coming in Zimbabwe all these people are looking for a certain narrative, and they’re selling a narrative. Now we don’t know who’s causing this narrative to be sold, we don’t know who’s buying people along the way, we don’t know if they’re bribed, but there’s possibilities. So we’re looking into that as to who’s running this narrative behind this campaign that Sole and the Sentry are running,” Moti said.

In the days before Thursday’s gagging order, Moti and his associates appeared to have stepped up their campaign.

On Friday 26 May, amaBhungane reporter Dewald van Rensburg received an email from one someone who claimed to work “for a large bank in Mauritius”.

The sender wrote that they had “received an email from an anonymous account” containing attachments “which appear to include internal company emails between Mr Sam Sole and Mr Micah Reddy [an amaBhungane reporter] and yourself”.

The email added: “These documents also appear to be correspondence with an attorney. The writer claims to have been informed about frequent trips taken to Gordon’s Bay by Mr Sole and claims to work for a wealthy competitor of your company.”

The sender offered to provide further assistance, but did not respond to van Rensburg’s reply. 

The following morning, Sole’s wife received a call on their home phone from a woman who, when asked, claimed to be one Michelle Botes.

Botes said she had been contracted to do research for a book Moti was writing on influential media personalities and she needed to ask Sam Sole, who was not home, about his military service.

Botes wanted to know why Sole was associated with, or visited, Gordon’s Bay, and made reference to these activities somehow being associated with “terrorism” or “treason”. But she claimed to be an independent researcher who was trying to establish if the allegations against Sole were just “bullshit”.

“Botes”, it soon turned out, was not the independent researcher she had claimed to be. She wasn’t even Michelle Botes.

The phone number left by Botes was linked to a Chrisna-Mari Els, who appears to have a legal qualification and was recently cited online as an employee of a marketing company.

When amaBhungane approached the company we were told that Els’ employment there ended over a year ago, and that she was later employed by a “mining company” – a possible reference to the Moti Group given its extensive interests in mining in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

When one amaBhungane journalist called the number left by Botes and asked to speak to her, the person on the other end confirmed she was “Botes” and promised to email questions she had for Sole.

When another amaBhungane journalist later called the same number asking to speak to Chrisna-Mari Els, the same person picked up and this time said she was Els.

When amaBhungane later called the Moti Group’s offices asking to speak to Els, we were told that she was in a meeting, but the receptionist confirmed that the number left by “Botes” in fact belonged to Els.

Attempts to reach Els again were unsuccessful and she never did send the questions. 

Fighting the gagging and protecting sources

AmaBhungane plans to fight the interim interdict obtained by the Moti Group.

“This kind of ex-parte prior restraint of publication and incursion into media freedom is unprecedented in the democratic era,” amaBhungane’s managing partner Sam Sole said on Thursday night.

“Nowhere in his papers does Mr. Mogajane remotely demonstrate that amaBhungane has acted outside of the public interest or outside of the highest journalistic standards. Despite his protestations it is a measure of what the Moti Group is desperate to conceal that it has taken this drastic step.”

In fact, Mogajane openly says he hopes the interdict will muzzle amaBhungane and shut down the negative flow of publicity that the Moti Group has been receiving as a result of the #MotiFiles revelations.

“If the applicants and the Moti Group do not urgently obtain the return of their stolen confidential documentation, amaBhungane will continue to publish one-sided and defamatory articles based entirely on the stolen confidential documents,” Mogajane warned.

Sole said amaBhungane’s lawyers had previously indicated to the Moti Group that copies of the documents were held on an offshore server that amaBhungane did not control.

That meant that amaBhungane had no power to “give back” all copies of documents that were in any case still in the Moti Group’s possession: “The only conceivable reason why they would need copies from us is to identify our sources,” he said.

The post #MotiFiles: Moti Group granted secret court order muzzling investigative journalists appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.

By this point, it was obvious that files from inside the Moti Group pertaining to his Zimbabwe business had leaked to journalists.

The Sentry, a US-based investigative journalism unit, had already sent questions about the same material. But Moti’s lawyer said they would need until 8 May to respond to us.

As a compromise, we agreed to wait until 26 April. In the two weeks that followed, the Moti Group machinery got to work to shore up the reputation of a multi-billion-rand business, using paid articles, legal threats and conspiracy theories.

The #MotiFiles

When the first major chapter of the #MotiFiles landed on 28 April, detailing how the Moti group attempted to cosy up to Zimbabwe’s ruling elite, the Moti Group had already secured three magazine covers: Leadership, Black Business Quarterly, and Financial Mail.

At least two of the covers were paid for by the Moti Group: Leadership and Financial Mail (which was an insert made to look like a cover and which some stores displayed in preference to the actual front cover).

The premise of all three stories was that the Moti Group was now being led by former Treasury director-general Dondo Mogajane (as CEO) and Moti’s 24-year-old son Mikaeel Moti (as executive chair).

Moti had announced he was stepping away from the Moti Group at the end of March. At this point, the Sentry had already started asking questions.

• AmaBhungane and the Sentry agreed to collaborate and publish together. Read the Sentry’s detailed investigative report: Spincash Machine (available in English, Shona and Ndebele).

Moti made oblique references to damaging allegations in the past but did not disclose that fresh allegations were emerging from the #MotiFiles.  

“Unfortunately, the damage that has been done to my reputation over the years by various criminal allegations has meant that the value I am able to add to the management and growth of the company has become limited.

“While I have a clear criminal record as I have never been found guilty of any of the ludicrous accusations made against me, as a business leader, I am big enough to say that the assertions have impacted my family, the businesses and, to a large extent, my life,” he told IOL.

But instead of stepping away, Moti has made himself the front man for the public relations fightback campaign.

The fightback

Days before the first article, Moti launched a Tiktok account: “Started filming yesterday for my tell-all video series for social media,” he wrote in one of his first posts.

When the amaBhungane and the Sentry exposés were published a few days later, Moti released a series of videos produced by his PR team denying the allegations and attempting to discredit the journalists who wrote the articles:

“It seems that because elections are coming in Zimbabwe all these people are looking for a certain narrative, and they’re selling a narrative. Now we don’t know who’s causing this narrative to be sold, we don’t know who’s buying people along the way, we don’t know if they’re bribed, but there’s possibilities. So we’re looking into that as to who’s running this narrative behind this campaign that Sole and the Sentry are running.”

Ironically, while Moti was accusing amaBhungane of being paid to push an agenda, his PR team continued buying paid content in other media to bolster the Moti Group’s reputation.

Behind the scenes, however, amaBhungane had been alerted to a growing threat to its journalists.

Criminal charges

In February, former Moti Group employee Clinton van Niekerk was arrested before he boarded an international flight in Durban. Van Niekerk had left the Moti Group in November 2022, and was accused of taking thousands of confidential files with him.

A month earlier, private investigator Paul O’Sullivan, who works with the Moti Group, had called Van Niekerk and threatened him with arrest if he did not return the files.

“Trust me when I tell you, you will face the music for what you’ve done. You can either cooperate with me, and things can be handled that way, or you can put your head in the ground and wait for justice to catch up with you,” O’Sullivan warned in a recorded call.

A month later, Van Niekerk was arrested on a fraud warrant but the arrest was set aside by the high court in Durban.

• Read The Moti Files: Red flags in police hunt for former Moti Group employee

Moti has always argued that the leaked #MotiFiles are “stolen” and has attempted to make the case that Van Niekerk is a “criminal” not a whistleblower.

In his initial response to amaBhungane’s questions Moti maintained that the documents amaBhungane might be relying on were stolen and that, by extension, amaBhungane is “knowingly perpetuating unlawful conduct”.

He warned, “Insofar as the matter is currently being investigated by the SAPS, I have instructed [my lawyers] to inform the SAPS of your involvement for purposes of potential further investigation and/or charges.” 

Fearing that its journalists would be targeted, amaBhungane’s attorney wrote to both the police and NPA, assuring them that amaBhungane would co-operate with any investigation and reminding them of the standing order that says police should not use arrests as a form of intimidation.

Within hours, we received an email from O’Sullivan threatening to declare war on amaBhungane.

“[Y]ou have made yourselves ‘fair game’. You really should have thought twice before receiving and using stolen property to exact revenge on me,” he wrote.

“If you want war, let’s go toe to toe. You try and destroy my reputation and I’ll try and destroy yours. Alternatively, we meet and have an off the record discussion and agree peace terms. If I don’t hear from you, by middle of next week, I shall assume you want that war.” When approached by GroundUp, O’Sullivan said he was not acting for the Moti Group when he made these threats. Meanwhile, Moti took to Tiktok to deny that he had laid criminal charges against amaBhungane – calling it “yet another example of amaBhungane’s smear-mongering” – then, a day later, he ran a Tiktok poll asking whether his followers thought he should lay criminal charges.

After amaBhungane sent questions on part 2 of the #MotiFiles – published yesterday – the legal threats intensified.

Moti the journalist

On Monday, the Moti Group’s lawyer Ulrich Roux delivered two letters: the first, was a response to our questions about the Moti Group’s secret loan to an Investec employee tasked with limiting the bank’s exposure to the group’s soaring debt.

• Read: Zunaid Moti’s ‘inside man’ at Investec

The second letter was from Moti, on a letterhead of the Moti Group, demanding answers to a list of conspiratorial questions about amaBhungane, its funders and editor Sam Sole’s time as a young conscript in the army.

The allegation that Sole was an apartheid spy has previously been aired by Iqbal Survé when some of his own businesses came under scrutiny by amaBhungane. It is untrue.

• Read Sole’s rebuttal published in 2019: Sam Sole sets the record straight

The allegation that amaBhungane’s articles are influenced by a shadowy web of neo-conservative funders is also untrue, and first emerged amongst Twitter bots attempting to discredit the #GuptaLeaks. Although it is easily disproven by reading our funding policy and disclosures on our website, it has often been rehashed by those who have found themselves the subjects of amaBhungane’s reporting or their supporters.

Moti’s theory that he was the victim of a conspiracy, linked to the Zimbabwe elections, had been quietly percolating amongst a handful of anonymous accounts on Twitter. All set up in the past month, the accounts floated the idea that Van Niekerk leaked documents to “sabotage the economy” of Zimbabwe.

“The West will not be happy until Zimbabwe bleeds,” one of the anonymous account wrote.

On Thursday, Moti tweeted: “Guys, check this out! 🤯🤯 I told you there’s sometimes bigger at play!” with a link to an article that rehashed the outlandish US-led conspiracy theory.

In the letter from the Moti Group, sent on Monday, Moti says: “we are conducting our own journalistic investigation with numerous other parties and informants regarding your conduct, which we plan to publish”.

Amongst the questions he posed was: “[Who] creates the narrative for Amabhungane? Do your sponsors utilize your organization to advance their own agendas, and if so, what are these agendas?” and “Why don’t you write any pieces on George Soros?”

AmaBhungane has responded to the Moti Group’s questions. See the full responses here.

In his letter on Monday, Moti once again threatened amaBhungane with criminal charges: “Since we can now conclusively prove with the metadata that at least some of the documents originated on our system, we will be notifying the authorities that you are without a doubt involved in the theft and are in possession and actively distributing stolen property.”

He added: “To date we have not opened any charges against you, but I now find myself in the position that I can no longer in good conscience allow you to keep getting away with theft, and accordingly am taking legal advice on my civil and legal duties in this regard.”

Our journalists are continuing to work on follow-up articles in the #MotiFiles series.

The post Analysis: Moti’s war for credibility appeared first on AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.