Kebble had many secrets

2005-09-28 12:48

Johannesburg - Mining magnate Brett Kebble was murdered on Tuesday night amid R1bn scandal that has his name written all over it, Moneyweb reported.

"Hundreds upon hundreds of millions of rands are missing and while some auditors scurry for the details, and some others resign, some of the beneficiaries may have taken fright," the financial website said on Wednesday.

"For weeks, there has been the overwhelming sense of a cover-up. Kebble, however, had no end of plain old-fashioned enemies, of the kind that would not hesitate to exact revenge."

Kebble, who had become known as the "new Barney Barnato", was on the way to the house of his partner, Sello Rasethaba, when he was shot five times at around 21:00.

He was found by a passerby on a bridge over Johannesburg's M1 freeway less than a kilometre from his home in Illovo.

One of the last people to see Kebble alive was his communications strategist, Dominic Ntsele. Ntsele arrived at Kebble's home at 19:00.

The two men chatted and sang along to the Gershwin tune "Summertime, and the living is easy".

Ntsele left Kebble at around 20:30.

Kebble's wife and children were reported to be in Cape Town.

Moneyweb said according to a regulatory filing by Randgold Resources with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington on June 30 this year it was made clear that 14.4 million shares that Randgold & Exploration (R&E) claimed to hold in Randgold Resources had gone missing.

The claim was repeated last Friday.

The "missing" shares - currently worth US$225m - were sold under the direction of Kebble, mostly, according to certain investors who have studied the action in great detail, during and around the third quarter of 2004.

Kebble, who was forced out as the chief executive of R&E (and also JCI Limited and Western Areas) on August 30, had sold the shares without the permission of either his board of directors or shareholders in R&E.

There appears to be a fair chance that at least some of the money went to Anglo American, for a bunch of Western Areas shares that Kebble had band-aided into an empowerment entity, Inkwenkwezi, via Bookmark, a shadowy financial entity, Moneyweb said.

R&E's audited financial statements for the year to December 31, 2004 are yet to be published.

R&E was suspended from the JSE on August 1, and delisted from the Nasdaq in the US last Wednesday night because it had failed to post its results.

"It is becoming increasingly apparent that Kebble had little, if any, intention of ever publishing R&E's audited 2004 figures," Moneyweb said.

R&E's new CEO, Peter Gray, last Thursday announced the withdrawal of R&E's preliminary (unaudited) 2004 results, published on April 29.

On the same day, R&E's auditors, Charles Orbach & Co, resigned.

Kebble insisted that the stock had been "lent" and would be returned to R&E in mid-2006.

The website said Kebble was known to give special and detailed attention to ensuring that people important to him were paid plenty of money.

In the year to March 31 2004, the directors of JCI were paid R12m, double the amount paid the year before.

"Consulting and management fees," which are nowhere explained, rose to R54m from R23m.

- SAPA