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Alameen Templeton
It may be “terror-financing suspect” Ziyadh Hoorzook is being hounded for a paltry R11 500 bitcoin purchase made seven years ago because that is about as big a case that South Africa’s ham-fisted prosecuting authorities can handle.
Meanwhile, masterminds of massive financial scandals totalling hundreds of billions of rands that blew up around the same time Hoorzook allegedly made the transaction are not only walking free, they’re still raking in billions.
Gangsters’ Paradise
With our Keystone Cops on the beat, South Africa has become Corruption Boom City.
And it’s not just Markaz Sahaba asking if Hoorzook is being set up by our portly prosecutors in a pathetic bid to remove South Africa from an international “grey list”.
Mybroadband is also asking some obvious questions, noting, “While it took the Hawks seven years to arrest a suspect in this case, that is infinitely better than the nothing the elite law enforcement agency has to show for cases like BTC Global and State Capture.”
BTC Global was a pyramid scheme operating in the Bitcoin space, luring in 27 000 victims from all over the world, before its alleged founder, Steven Twain (who may or may not be a fictitious character), disappeared along with $50million (R875million). He disappeared a year after Hoorzook allegedly made his R11 500 transaction, but the Hawks have still made no arrests, and still have no real proof he existed at all.
Chasing a ghost
Twain’s ephemeral existence makes him an almost-perfect fall guy – the Hawks are always “on the case” and his henchmen just shrug their shoulders and say “but Twain took the money”.
Unlike Twain, Hoorzook definitely exists, and he can be presented in court as an affirmation that the Hawks really do investigate things. But, is he in court because a R11 500 deal is appropriate for investigation by a national agency with all the presumed power and resources behind it, or is he in court because he doesn’t have the big bucks to defend and delay or simply buy off the prosecution?
The Steinhoff saga burst like a suppurating boil just a few months after Hoorzook made his donation to “Al-Sadaqah”, an organisation in Syria saying it was assisting the mujahideen, in 2017. At that stage it was not red-flagged (it was only marked as an organisation of interest in the US in 2021, nearly four years after Hoorzook made his donation. And that occurred in an ex-parte application in which Al-Sadaqah made no representations, nor was it given chance to defend itself).
Steinhoff imploded on December 6 2017, wiping R120billion off its market value in just a few hours. Within a few weeks, almost all its R236billion market value had disappeared, and its share lumped among the “penny stocks”, trading for less than R1.
Twiddling thumbs
Markus Jooste, its founder and chief executive, had simply melted into the background. The Hawks were stumped; they had nothing. In 2019, after nearly two years of nothing, Public Prosecutions national director Shamila Batohi admitted simply that the NPA did not have the in-house skills to prosecute commercial crimes like Steinhoff.
German authorities had investigated and found him guilty by August 2023 for crimes in that country related to Steinhoff’s implosion. The Hawks, no doubt bolstered by the evidence gathered by their German colleagues, only got around to issuing an arrest warrant for Jooste seven months later.
He promptly committed suicide, taking a lot of valuable evidence and information with him.
In the end, only chief financial officer Ben la Grange was prosecuted for one count of fraud. Considering the international scope of Steinhoff’s reach, there were clearly quite a few more people than Jooste and La Grange involved, but they are still walking free.
Four brothers from India came to South Africa and beat up the entire country, but the Guptas are still at large. Tom Moyane the SA Revenue Service commissioner and Bain International deliberately went about destroying the institution, but Moyane still lives the life of Reilly.
Schedule 6 suspect
More than 2 000 highly skilled senior staff members were lost as a result of Moyane’s efforts, and the institution is still trying to recover.
But Hoorzook is facing a Schedule 6 bail application, which make it next-to-impossible to win bail because he’s supposedly an international terror financier.
The Zondo Commission concluded: “The only feasible conclusion is that the organization was deliberately captured and President (Jacob) Zuma and Mr Moyane played critical roles in the capture of Sars and dismantling it in the way it was done during Mr Moyane’s term as Commissioner.
“What occurred at Sars was inevitable the moment Mr Moyane set foot there. He dismantled the elements of governance one by one. This was more than mere mismanagement. It was seizing control of Sars as if it was his to have,” it continued.
Mirror Trading was another SA-based pyramid scheme that ran for just over a year before collapsing in 2020. Exactly how much money was lost is still uncertain (the Hawks, after all, are on the case), but estimates are that R19.5billion worth of Bitcoin were being traded on the platform, making it the biggest pyramid scheme ever in South Africa.
According to Mybroadband, “The scheme’s promoters were extremely active online, posting videos, audio, and text to YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere, leaving volumes of evidence of their activities.
“Law enforcement also has access to a database of every MTI member and the funds they deposited and withdrew from the scheme, obtained from the hosting company that developed MTI’s website.
“Despite this, there have been no arrests.”
Plenty of crime but no arrests … until the perfect, little guy wandered into the crosshairs.
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