Brett Kebble's ghost, and his hit men

Glenn Agliotti now also charged with conspiracy to murder four others, including Mark Bristow, CEO of Randgold Resources.

JOHANNESBURG - 

Convicted drug trafficker Glenn Agliotti's murder trial kicked off on Monday in Johannesburg, with the surprise addition of conspiracy-to-murder charges. Surprise? Agliotti, charged with the murder of Brett Kebble on 27 September 2005, also now faces conspiracy murder charges in respect of four living people, Mark Wellesley-Wood, Mark Bristow, Jean Nortier, and Stephen Mildenhall.

Agliotti, who worked for Kebble, faces a tough prosecution, all right. State witness Clinton Nassif, Kebble's head of security, hired the three gunsels who hunted Kebble down. The three have also turned state witness; Mikey Schultz, the man who pulled the trigger, testified on Monday. One man, conspicuous by his absence, is John "Turtle" Stratton, whom prosecutors have been keen to coax out of Australia.

Stratton, Kebble's erstwhile confidant, and a co-director of JCI, Kebble's flagship, was so confident that his master plan had succeeded that he strutted around South Africa until the heat built up to boiling point. One of the great enduring mysteries, to those not yet in the know, is why Agliotti called erstwhile national South African police commissioner Jackie Selebi from the scene of Kebble's murder.

Selebi was, of course, recently convicted of corruption, mainly for receiving Kebble monies that Kebble had looted, and routed to Selebi via Agliotti. In that case, Agliotti turned state witness, but the judge made it clear that only testimony that could be corroborated by reliable witnesses would be accepted.

Selebi allegedly received R1.2m, which is tiny beer in the broader context. According to summarized forensic reports published by Randgold & Exploration (R&E) in the public domain, R&E was looted by Kebble and his cronies of R1.9bn in cash, by way of shares stolen from R&E and then sold on the open markets for cash.

According to R&E, it was effectively looted of a further R1bn in other ways, such as selling fresh shares in R&E for cash, and allocating the cash for looting. The sum total of R2.9bn is a very fat roast. Most of the stolen shares (by value) were in Randgold Resources, an entity that was partially spun out of R&E back in 1997 and listed offshore. In the year or so before Kebble's death, Bristow, CEO of Randgold Resources from inception, was increasingly noisy about R&E's claims as to what it still held in Randgold Resources. Kebble didn't like that.

As for Wellesley-Wood, it was from January to October 1999 that Western Areas (controlled by Kebble), and Hennie Buitendag (Kebble's financial whizz), along with Roger Kebble, collectively crossed too many bridges in attempting to implement a restructuring of the companies in the JCI-Randgold group. The hijacking of Randfontein, a gold miner, was one of the main keys to Kebble's twisted dreams.

In the explosive aftermath, Roger Kebble stepped down as executive chairman of DRD Gold, on 3 May 2000. Wellesley-Wood, who hailed from London's financial district, the City, stepped in as non-executive chairman. Once he had availed himself of what was really going on, he unleashed an entire Panzer division, initiating one of South Africa's biggest corporate wars.

Three years after the (failed) Randfontein raid, Brett and Roger Kebble, plus Buitendag, and Western Areas, were indicted for fraud, conspiracy and insider trading. As for Nortier, who at material times was CFO of Aflease, the connection there goes back to Cape Town-based Trinity Asset Management, which found itself mixed up in a complicated deal involving an entity called Kabusha, which held shares in Aflease.

Kebble, who effectively controlled Kabusha, had reneged on one funding promise after another. On 25 July 2005, Kebble effectively agreed to a ceasefire, and signed an agreement with Nortier, and Trinity's Quinton George. It seemed that Nortier made his way onto Kebble's hitlist because Quinton's father, Peter, had baptised Kebble as a born-again Christian in his swimming pool at home just months before Kebble was slain.

Agliotti has also been charged with the attempted murder of Stephen Mildenhall, erstwhile chief investment officer at Allan Gray, based in Cape Town. Allan Gray had for some years been the single biggest institutional shareholder in Kebble's three key listed entities, JCI, R&E, and Western Areas. Just weeks before 1 August 2005, when Kebble was fired as CEO of each, mainly on Allan Gray's insistence, Mildenhall was shot outside his Cape Town home. He survived and left the country.

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