Pauli van Wyk

INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST AT SCORPIO, DAILY MAVERICK

Why we think she’s brilliant:

For her story on the SARS ‘rogue unit’, for tracing the money from the VBS Mutual Bank fraud to the EFF, and for pursuing dubious dealings at Insure Group Managers.

The back story: Pauli first started investigating the SARS state capture story in 2014. To recap: Johann van Loggerenberg was head of the hugely successful High-Risk Investigations Unit at SARS, and he was known to have sufficient evidence on illicit cigarette smuggling to turn the industry on its head. The companies implicated ranged from international players like British American Tobacco (BAT) and Phillip Morris, to smaller, seemingly independent local companies like Carnilinx and Gold Leaf. But the rogueunit narrative, in which the State Security Agency (SSA) had a hand, was a tale spun to discredit the SARS investigation and to pave the way for new SARS commissioner Tom Moyane to disband its internal and external investigations units, effectively removing the risk of any light being shone on wrongdoers.

Pauli’s investigation led to an apology and retraction from the Sunday Times, and to KPMG withdrawing its own report. Her story reads like a spy novel, complete with a triple agent laying a honeytrap (Belinda Walters, who worked for the SSA, BAT and Carnilinx) and a wronged lover (Van Loggerenberg).

This is possibly what led Pauli to another extraordinary investigation: the R2.7 billion VBS bank heist, where poor people and pensioners were defrauded of their life savings. She obtained bank statements showing that the EFF’s Shivambu brothers, Brian and Floyd, as well as Julius Malema, benefited from the heist through Brian Shivambu’s company Sgameka Projects.

What drives her: Pauli says she couldn’t shake the image of the VBS investors sleeping out in the cold, waiting for word of their hard-earned savings. She imagined how she’d have felt if her mother had been among them. Her rocks, she says, are her husband as well as the Daily Maverick editor-in-chief, Branco Brkic, who make it possible for her to do her job.