Hennie van Vuuren | Financial Mail | 12 March 2020 Last week, lawyer Robert Appelbaum floated the idea of an amnesty for perpetrators of state capture. It’s a short-sighted idea, designed to appease the powerful and corrupt, says Open Secrets’ Hennie van Vuuren In the home of Joburg-based corporate lawyer Robert Appelbaum hangs a portrait…
After hounding out the whistleblower who exposed Liberty Life’s disastrous pension fund cancellations programme, the insurer has sat on its hands. It is extraordinary to see how pension industry insiders leap to defend insurance behemoth Liberty Life for its scandalous handling of the unlawful cancellation of hundreds of pension funds. A recent investigative report by…
Tabitha Paine | Lee-Ann Bruce Without the help of European banks, the apartheid government would not have been able to buy arms and continue its campaign of violence and oppression. Between 1977 and 1994, countless people lost their lives while the banks essentially profited from their deaths. What can be done to hold the banks…
Between 2007 and 2013, more than 6,000 pension funds in South Africa were cancelled in a process littered with errors and oversights. Today, Open Secrets has written to five of the country’s largest pension fund administrators to demand swift action to reinstate pension funds that have been incorrectly cancelled. This is the first of many…
South Africa’s history is one of rapacious profit-taking by corporate elites at the expense of South African people and its environment. Whether it was the Dutch East India Company, Anglo-American and De Beers, or Lonmin, the rules of the game have for too long been set to enable extraction and profit-taking that has entrenched gross…
A large shipment of 50 ‘Super Puma’ helicopter ‘kits’, sent to South Africa from French arms company Aerospatiale via Portugal, was typical of apartheid-era covert sanctions-busting deals. Now that news has broken that a Portuguese arms trader wants his R8bn commission for the deal, isn’t it about time to free the apartheid archive, open the…
“I have saved enough to retire peacefully. But now I will turn in my grave because I will die in poverty.” This was said by Douglas Maila, a member of the Unpaid Benefits Campaign, at a protest outside Alexander Forbes demanding that it pay pensioners the benefits they are owed. Maila’s experience of contributing a…
The People’s Tribunal on Economic Crime has the potential to reshape the trajectory of how we conceptualise economic crime and the role of the private sector. South Africans have been staggering through multiple exposés on private and public sector corruption over the past few months alone, be it allegations of looting of public funds by…
Why are government failures so distinctly imprinted in the public’s memories, while outrage over private sector corruption enjoys a much shorter lifespan? If you listen carefully to the findings of the first People’s Tribunal on Economic Crime, held at Constitution Hill last month, you will hear a common refrain: The private sector has aided and abetted…
In a disappointing decision a majority of seven justices rejected the appeal of whistle-blower Rosemary Hunter and found that the Financial Services Conduct Authority (FSCA) did not need to undertake further investigation into the unlawful cancellation of thousands of pension funds.