By DM | 2024-11-05

Our series on money laundering has until now focused on the network around alleged money launderer Howie Baker, gold trader Andries Greyvensteyn and tobacco mogul Simon Rudland.

In this instalment of The #Laundry, amaBhungane takes a closer look at a below-the-radar player in the notorious cash-in-transit industry which has moved huge amounts of money for an extremely shadowy clientele, who include international fraudsters, dodgy accountants, an alleged pyramid scheme and, seemingly, state capturers.

Back in 2011, a bizarre fraud was committed in the UK when Dutch shipbuilding magnate Edward Heerema was swindled out of millions of pounds by a gang of con artists.

Although the story is complex, it boils down to this: The alleged mastermind, Polish-Canadian Marek Rejniak, convinced Heerema that he was an agent of the US Federal Reserve with access to a mysterious VIP trading platform belonging to the Vatican and called the House of Aragon.

Heerema and his staff were sufficiently impressed by Rejniak and his collaborators’ fake personas to put up £100-million in order to earn supposedly outlandish profits on this unlikely platform. About £16-million of that disappeared before Heerema managed to extricate himself from his quixotic “investment”.

Rejniak’s colleagues were eventually caught, but the man himself disappeared.
Investigators hired by Heerema chased tips and rumours around the world. Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and Mexico were some of the places Rejniak allegedly cropped up, armed with a half-dozen passports and permanently packed suitcases.

AmaBhungane can add one more stop on that itinerary – South Africa, where Rejniak quietly showed up in 2015 as the sole director of a company named Atrum Investments.

And here the story takes a turn that leads us straight into Johannesburg’s “shadow banks” – cash-in-transit companies that in practice can also be used as wholesale clearing houses for illicit money flows, while seemingly asking very few questions.

Registered at a modest office park in Krugersdorp, Rejniak’s Atrum pumped roughly R400 million into the operating account of one such cash-in-transit company RENS Kontant in Transito over three years.

Additionally, the same people who set up Atrum for Rejniak created four more companies that likewise started pouring money into RENS  R3 billion of which we can see in our limited data – destined for cash delivery in Johannesburg and surrounds

For a sense of scale, RENS handled at least R10 billion in the four years we have good data  from 2015 to the beginning of 2019 and there is no reason to assume business has died off since then.

The takeaway is that RENS was effectively a nexus for questionable money flows, much like Asset Movement Financial services (AMFS), a rival cash-in-transit company we have dealt with extensively in this series.

The real question about these shadow banks, however, is: who needs to bank in the shadows?
Among those making use of RENS’ services were a number of entities implicated in spiriting away the spoils of State Capture.

Others were allegedly major players in the illicit tobacco trade and yet others seemingly ran long-lived regional money-laundering networks, exchange control-dodging hawala schemes or, in one case, an alleged pyramid scheme.

In general, RENS served an astonishing variety of actors. In this it not only resembles AMFS but also other entities amaBhungane has investigated, and which we will deal with in due course.
What is particularly striking is how the clients of these large nexuses for money flows overlap. It is, we will show, a small world.

Before we dissect RENS’ clientele, however, some background is in order.
RENS is run by mother-and-son team Christoffel and Jacoba “Kotie” Janse van Rensburg – the latter a former police officer and one-time board member of the Bond van Oud Polisiebeamptes, a social club for retired police officers.

RENS operates in an essentially identical way to AMFS, which we have reported on in a previous instalment of this series.

Millions of rands are received daily in the form of either cash pickups or electronic transfers that get mixed up and then paid out, again via a combination of cash deliveries and electronic transfers.

Their commission was, in the period for which we have data, in the range of 0.3 to 0.5 per cent of the money moved.

And with AMFS, much of the money, at least on paper, comes from the gold industry.
By their own admission, however, the Janse van Rensburgs take very little interest in where money actually comes from or where it goes.

In a commission of inquiry held in Johannesburg in 2019 in relation to the disastrous looting of the Namibian small and medium enterprises bank, the two were grilled about a relatively small payment that made its way through RENS.

From RENS’s records, it is clear that it has serviced a small core of clients, but that each of these would be arranging payments from many different sources and to many destinations. They are, in other words, essentially brokers acting as intermediaries between RENS and the ultimate users of its services.

In response to questions, RENS’s attorneys accused amaBhungane of acting “as if you were part of the various incumbent structures of the State investigating the incidents, which is of course not the case”.

“Kindly note our client’s stated position that it was at no stage wilfully or knowingly engaged in any illegal or nefarious conduct.”

They further demanded that we divulge the source of our information and provide copies of our documentation.

We already touched on RENS in our previous instalment, showing how it received and paid onwards millions of rands for better-known figures (including Howard “Howie” Baker) entangled in a massive money moving endeavour involving Aulion Global Trading, a Dubai-based company introduced earlier in this series.

Altogether RENS paid R480 million to AMFS and other entities tied to Baker, essentially creating a double layer of obfuscation between parties paying money and parties receiving money.

Of that, R83-million made its way to Saleem Ebrahim Attorneys, which in turn paid the money onwards to Prodigy Trading, a Hong Kong entity belonging to Baker.

Readers may recall that we previously exposed Ebrahim as the creator of a short-lived front company named Actinic Holdings, which likewise expatriated money for Baker.
(Ebraim did not respond to our questions at the time, but in court papers the South African Revenue Service referenced his explanation that he denied wrongdoing and contended that he was merely acting on the instructions of his clients.)
 
The social entrepreneur
One more significant recipient of money from Baypass (via RENS) was a Sandton-based boutique “business development” consultancy named the Echelon Group, which received at least R161 million – the amount we can track for the period our banking data covers.

Importantly, the Echelon Group has also received smaller amounts from AMFS (as well as, more recently, several million rands from another Baker entity named Inracom, which we first reported on here).

It was, in other words, also, like many RENS clients, a client of the separate money-moving network around Baker.

The Echelon Group was founded by “social entrepreneur and philanthropist” Khanyisa Mothema and has, according to its website, counted among its clients the City of Johannesburg, the Industrial Development Corporation and the Development Bank of Southern Africa.

It has also “engaged various government departments in Zimbabwe on meeting their development funding goals”. In Echelon’s bank statements, we see the Baypass payments arrive, after which they mostly get distributed to a small set of beneficiaries identified by what appear to be initials.
 
The dodgy accountant
Another consistent customer of RENS was controversial accountant Wolfram Landgrebe and his South African-Namibian firm WKH Landgrebe.

Landgrebe surfaced during the Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture (commonly known as the Zondo Commission) as an apparent channel for the dissipation of money from the infamous R2.65-billion Prasa contract that saw the country procure trains that were ill-suited for use on our rail network.

A first audit of money flowing from the tender was conducted by Ryan Sacks of Horwath Forensics and presented to the Zondo Commission in 2021.

With regards to Landgrebe, it was found that the small audit firm was paid R28 million by the winning bidder, Swifambo Rail Holdings, and also received indirect payments that had not been quantified at the time Sacks’ report was presented.

This total was raised to R30.5 million by a later audit commissioned by Swifambo’s liquidators. In addition, the liquidators found payments of R55 million to Landgrebe from another entity involved in the Prasa scandal, Auswell Mashaba Consulting Engineers.

This money was largely used to purchase property for Landgrebe’s client, the CEO and major shareholder of Swifambo, Auswell Mashaba.

AmaBhungane can now shed light on some of Landgrebe’s wider operations. Landgrebe’s firm paid more than R130 million into RENS in the period our data covers. Before that it had also paid around R64 million into shadow bank AMFS, and before that it paid at least R44 million into Rustic Stone, AMFS’ predecessor.

Our interpretation of the accounts suggests that this money was destined for cash delivery to unknown recipients.

At both RENS and AMFS, Landgrebe was simply known as Wolf, and records show that he earned a modest 0.05 per cent commission on all the cash he sent RENS’ way. 

According to a report by Open Secrets, Landgrebe was the subject of an investigation by the Independent Regulatory Board for Auditors. The board told us that this investigation is “ongoing”. In response to amaBhungane’s questions, WKH Landgrebe said that it does “not intend to respond to your interrogatories”.

Gys and Mauri
One major client in RENS’ books is Metal Enhancors, a refinery that, evidence suggests, has also been a major force behind the scenes of the local illicit financial system.

In our data we can see RENS make payments of more than R620 million on Metal Enhancors’ behalf.

Separately, as previously reported, Metal Enhancors was the source of  astonishing R2 billion sent to Inracom yet another endeavour implicating Baker  illustrating how the clientele of companies like RENS and AMFS tend to use several conduits in parallel.

Back at RENS, Metal Enhancor’s recently deceased owner Gysbert Kriel was known as “Oom Gys”. We tracked down his widow, who professed complete ignorance of his business dealings.

According to RENS documents, the man in charge seems to have been one Mauri Swanepoel. Swanepoel seemingly also used RENS to channel millions into a company that liquidators have since described as a multimillion-rand pyramid scheme.

Layer upon layer
In May 2022, the Gauteng Division of the High Court in Pretoria granted a liquidation order against Kadosh Finance.

According to an unopposed application by liquidators, Kadosh formed part of a complicated investment scheme run by Swanepoel. DM
It allegedly worked as follows:

Investors would be recruited to “lend” money to a first layer of conduit companies with promises of interest rates of up to 18%.

 
 
 

To further confuse matters, the payments being made to RENS by Atrum, Allmine, Eventskiwido and Femo were apparently all ordered by an entirely different character to whom we will return  in another instalment – a wildly prolific dealmaker named George Markides.

Returning to RENS’ client book, however, we find more major conduits for funds to deeply suspect beneficiaries.

In particular, a close look at the books seems to show that investigators and researchers may have missed at least one channel through which the profits of Gupta-led State Capture made their way out of the country.

More on that in our next instalment. DM

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