THE C-SUITE GOONS
You wouldn’t think a CEO would risk everything by hiring a thug to assault someone. But as the case of Brett Kebble illustrates, it does happen
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Just after 7pm on August 31 2005, three gunmen confronted Allan Gray fund manager Stephen Mildenhall in his Cape Town home and pumped two bullets into his right shoulder, and one into his left. They fled, taking his wallet. Mildenhall who spent three days in ICU, survived. Rumours immediately began to swirl — the juiciest of which was that Brett Kebble, the savvy, if unethical, CEO of mining companies JCI and Randgold & Exploration, was somehow responsible.
It seemed like a ludicrous conspiracy. Sure, Kebble wasn’t happy that weeks before, Mildenhall had insisted he quit as CEO of the mining companies, as a quid pro quo for Allan Gray providing a R500m lifeline for them. Nor was he charmed that investors wanted him to explain the location of R2bn in assets he’d filched.
But to order a hit? Surely not. CEOs don’t do that kind of thing, even if they’re the sort of power-drunk lout who would park somebody in until 8pm if they dared usurp the CEO’s hallowed parking spot. Besides, crime is routine in SA: even Allan Gray’s internal investigators reckoned it was just a “normal robbery”. And yet, as it happens, Kebble did order the hit. In court in 2010, it emerged that one Faizel Smith had paid two men R150,000 to shoot Mildenhall and make it look like an attempted hijacking. Not kill him, mind, just “put him out of commission” for a while.
Mikey Schultz, the notorious bruiser, testified that Mildenhall was one of the guys “standing in [Kebble’s] way”, so he had to be “shot and put in hospital”.
As “proof” that the job had been done, Mildenhall’s wallet and driver’s licence were handed to Kebble’s security head, Clinton Nassif.
It was an indication of Kebble’s desperation. And, within a month, Kebble had been shot dead on Athol Oaklands Road, overlooking the M1 highway — in what Glenn Agliotti later said was an “assisted suicide”.
I was reminded of this when claims emerged this week that Sbu Shabalala, the CEO of the Umhlangabased technology company Adapt IT, had hired goons to rough up the boyfriend of his estranged wife, Neo.
Her boyfriend is Sipho Nzuza, eThekwini’s suspended city manager who was arrested last year in connection with a corrupt city tender. After the assault, in the bedroom of Neo’s home in Zimbali Estate, he apparently underwent emergency surgery to have his spleen and part of a kidney removed.
Last week, the Sunday Times reported that Neo was granted an interdict by the Durban high court, preventing Sbu from assaulting, threatening or eavesdropping on her. In an affidavit, Neo reportedly claimed that on May 1, “I was confronted by Sbu together with five heavily armed men. They were armed with large automatic rifles, which looked like AK-47s, handguns and batons.”
After she was ushered into another room, with a gun to her head, Neo claims Sbu “then instructed the gunmen to go into the master bedroom [where] they brutally assaulted Sipho”.
Neo was apparently threatened that unless she signed a legal agreement, which appears to have been part of the separation, she’d also be assaulted.
If true, it’s a remarkable story. The Sunday Times reported that Sbu agreed to the court order “without making any admission regarding the allegations”.
However, the Daily News quoted Nzuza as having said he’d been attacked by people “unhappy with the good work he had been doing for the city”.
Wherever the truth lies, it’s a nightmare for Adapt IT, which is now sitting with a buyout offer from the Canadian software group Volaris.
On Monday, Shabalala said he would be taking a three-month “leave of absence” from Adapt IT and finance director Tiffany Dunsdon would step in as acting CEO. “I need a little respite. Time for rest and selfcare while I deal with personal battles,” he said.
He described the “cold-hearted” allegations against him as without merit. “I am now being accused of violent and uncharacteristic behaviour, in what is clearly an unrelated attack,” he said.
I’m not sure Adapt IT investors entirely agree. The share price tanked 13% on Monday alone — a R134m fall for a company valued at R1bn before.
This is not a situation you’ll see often at a JSE-listed company. And quite how the board, chaired by Craig Chambers, deals with it is critical: it will need to independently investigate, since no investor — including the Canadians — wants a company run by a thug.
Right now, the board seems frozen. Sent questions by the FM this week — about whether it had asked Shabalala to step aside, and to what extent this scandal had spooked Volaris — the board hadn’t answered by the time of going to press.
We know now, partly from the way Steinhoff’s board initially dismissed claims of fraud in 2015, that how a board responds at such a moment is critical. It means the next few months will be as much a test for Chambers’s board as they will be for Shabalala.
We know now, from the Steinhoff saga, that how a board responds at such a moment is critical