UNCAPTURED:
THE STORY OF THE NENEGATE WHISTLE-BLOWER
It is Monday, October 26 2015. I’m in the office of Regiments Capital executive Eric Wood for our morning coffee and we’re chatting. Out of the blue, he says: “Mosilo, Jacob Zuma is going to fire the finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene.”
It sounds like a bombshell. But in truth, I didn’t think much of it at the time. We didn’t concern ourselves much with ministers, even finance ministers. President Zuma had numerous midnight cabinet reshuffles during his tenure, so I wasn’t overly interested in this one.
Wood went on to add that the new minister would approve projects such as the nuclear deal, and capital projects to be issued by Eskom and Transnet.
I didn’t understand the significance of what he was saying, so I didn’t ask him how he knew, months before, that this would happen, or why he was telling me. I certainly had no idea how it would change the course of my life and that of SA politics.
What I do recall vividly about that day is Wood. He was wearing a bespoke three-piece suit (he always wore two-piece suits – the ladies in the kitchen called him “KK”, after a character in the soapie Muvhango). He seemed excited and in a particularly good mood — quite different from his usual grumpy, anxious demeanour.
Later that morning, he asked me to save a document he’d sent me. When I opened it, I saw it was titled “National Treasury”, and that it outlined proposals for the Treasury and suggested fees.
It would later emerge that Wood had sent the same document two hours earlier to Salim Essa, the business partner of the Gupta family, with an e-mail saying: “Dear Salim, please find the initiatives for the FM [finance minister] will provide a more comprehensive list later. Eric.”
I later learnt that Essa was Wood’s mystery black empowerment partner at Trillian Capital Partners, which opened its doors a few months later, in March 2016.
As fate would have it, the same day that I heard of Nene’s imminent firing, the finance minister himself was told an extraordinary story by his deputy, Mcebisi Jonas.
Fearing their offices might be bugged, they spoke on Nene’s balcony. A flustered Jonas told Nene that, three days earlier, at the Guptas’ notorious Saxonwold compound, Ajay Gupta had offered him the position of finance minister.
In Jonas’s telling, he would be paid R600m — R600,000 upfront – if he agreed to help the family in their state-capture ambitions. His first task would be to fire a list of top people at the National Treasury. Shocked and angry, he refused.
I soon learnt that after Nene was to be fired, Mo Bobat, who had worked with me at Regiments Capital, was going to be the new finance minister’s adviser. This was a huge surprise — Bobat was a chartered accountant in management consulting; what did he know about public finance?
But Wood’s prediction was on the money. Six weeks later, at midnight on Wednesday December 9 2015, Zuma made a decision that would rock SA: he fired Nene, who’d been in the job less than two years.
I was woken in the early hours of the next day by my phone ringing. It was my boyfriend, Vusi Mavimbela, calling from Zimbabwe. “What are you guys doing?” he asked.
It was Vusi who first told me
Nene had been fired.
“But I’ve known all along that that was
What it means: People were exiled, jailed or killed to end apartheid. Our fight against state capture and corruption is in the boardroom
going to happen,” I said.
“What do you mean you’ve known all along?” He sounded astonished. That woke me up. I was about to answer, but I stopped myself. I told him I’d tell him later.
By the time I got to the office, the markets were plummeting and the rand was in freefall. Nene was a popular and respected finance minister; David Des van Rooyen, his replacement, wasn’t well known.
“So you were right,” I said, walking into Wood’s office for our morning coffee.
“Yes,” he replied, “I told you.”
He went on to say that Bobat had been appointed Van Rooyen’s special adviser. In his new role, he’d apparently get inside information about tenders that the Treasury issued and would be able to pass on information about technical and pricing specifications.
I was horrified.
Outside, there was carnage: the JSE financial index fell 13.36%, the banks index dropped 18.54% and the all share index shed 2.9%.
I later learnt that Wood had allegedly used his knowledge of Nene’s imminent firing to make a fortune for Regiments. He’d apparently bet against the market, using the Transnet Pension Fund and City of Johannesburg bonds that Regiments managed. They’d made a profit of between R300m and R600m — with Transnet’s pensioners taking the corresponding loss. (The story published by the FM on May 8 2019, “The Nene Short”, by Mark Anderson and Khadija Sharife, elaborates on this.)
The craziness extended into the weekend when, late on Sunday
December 13, Zuma back-pedalled and announced that Van
Rooyen would switch positions with minister of cooperative governance & traditional affairs (Cogta)
Pravin Gordhan. By
Monday morning, Van Rooyen had been dubbed the “Weekend Special”.
Wood had appointed a PR company to write Van Rooyen’s first speech as finance minister. Now, given his transfer to Cogta, the speech had to be amended.
I naively thought that was the end of it. Gordhan would stabilise the Treasury, and there would be no inside track on tenders for the new company, Trillian.
But I had no idea of the magnitude of Wood and Essa’s plans. And I had no idea I would be unwittingly used as a vehicle for state capture.
The road to Regiments
I’ve often wondered where my whistleblower journey began. I wondered how it was that, after my experience with Wood, I found myself in the offices of the public protector and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and, ultimately, in hospital, where I feared I might never recover my health and sanity.
My mother was an economist from Lesotho, who had three children with my father. My father was a violent and abusive man who drank heavily. My mother left him and raised my siblings and me alone.
In 1986, she was offered the role of Lesotho’s deputy ambassador to Brussels. I had no concept of Europe, let alone Belgium, and I remember asking my mom if I could take some sand, because who knew if this exotic, foreign place even had any.
Seven years later we returned to Lesotho, where I attended Machabeng College, which offered GCSEs and A levels. But I wanted to become a chartered accountant, so I set my sights on studying at Wits University. After graduating, however, I did six months of auditing in Lesotho — and hated it. So I completed an honours in corporate finance and investment.
More concretely perhaps, my path to becoming a whistleblower began in October 2005, when I took a job at the City of Johannesburg. It was there that I first came into contact with Regiments Capital and the people who would become my colleagues, friends and adversaries: Regiments director and shareholder Niven Pillay, financial manager Calvin Sehlapelo and executive chair Litha Nyhonyha.
Regiments’ mandate was to manage Joburg’s “sinking fund”, which holds funds that will later be used to repay bonds.
By November 2007, Regiments recruited me as an associate director. When I went for my interview at their offices in Melrose Arch, it was the first time I met Wood.
He was the quietest of Regiments’ directors, with an anxious demeanour. He made no small talk. This was not a guy who would ask how it’s going or take you to lunch. He was, however, exceptionally intelligent.
Wood came from a modest background. He didn’t go to university; he matriculated and went straight to work. Based on experience, he later enrolled in an MBA programme and went on to obtain his PhD.
While he’s highly intelligent, Wood is not so great when it comes to social skills. He could be quite unaware of his wealth and how it appeared to clients, saying things like: “I can’t come to that meeting; a rhinoceros is being delivered to my farm.”
He drove multimillion-rand cars (like his shiny Aston Martin) and lived the high life. But he was also a penny-pincher: he’d pay for parking at Melrose Arch with a R10 note, and when the machine didn’t give him his change, he’d spend 15 minutes looking for
the admin office so he could get his R5 back.
Regiments wanted to duplicate what it was doing for the Joburg metro in other municipalities, taking its “bespoke fundmanagement solutions” to Tshwane, Ekurhuleni, Cape Town, eThekwini and elsewhere.
But it was a hard sell, and my first stint at Regiments ended badly. After a blow-up in November 2010, when Wood threw a tantrum in the corridor and, for everyone’s entertainment, started shouting at me about my incompetence, I resigned.
Over the next few years, I did various things — worked for Transaction Capital, KPMG and SunEdison. In May 2015 I got a call from Wood, who wanted me to come back. At the time I was an associate director in infrastructure and major projects at
KPMG, but I was doing bits and pieces, and I felt bored and underutilised.
Wood cut to the chase. “I want you to come back,” he said. “But can I afford you?”
He explained that Regiments would be working for Eskom as global consulting firm McKinsey’s BEE partner, providing management consulting services, and he needed a senior person to recruit a team of energy experts and modellers for the project.
I agreed. But from my first day back, it was clear that Regiments was a different company from the one I’d joined 10 years before. I entered an elegant reception area with leather couches, glossy magazines and a huge flower arrangement. The staff complement had grown from 50 to 250. This was no longer a “boutique firm”.
Most of SA’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were now clients of Regiments.
When I asked Wood what the magic formula was, he told me, with some pride, that the company had adopted a different business model. Regiments now worked with “business-development partners” — namely businessmen Kuben Moodley and Essa.
He explained that Essa was a well-connected operator who had formed relationships with Zuma, government ministers and directors-general, the boards of SOEs and powerful CEOs, CFOs and treasurers. These men would introduce Regiments and McKinsey to SOE directors and executives and facilitate contracts — and, for every successful contract, Essa and Moodley would earn a “business origination fee” of 5%-60%.
This didn’t ring any alarm bells. The business development model is common practice in consulting firms. It is legal and acceptable, provided all regulations are adhered to.
Wood and I were both early birds. He was always at his desk when I arrived at 77.30am, and we got into the habit of having coffee in his office every morning.
Our chats were not just about work. I got to know the ins and outs of his personal life. He told me stories about his wife, Paula, who had a taste for expensive jewellery, and that he had a fitting with a tailor who was flying over from London. He showed me the invoice: R1.2m for three suits.
He also sometimes confided in me his frustrations with his two co-directors, and he once said something that I never forgot: “Be loyal to me and I will reward you.”
When I think of that today, it brings chills to my spine. At the time, I had no idea that loyalty would mean being complicit in impropriety and corruption, and keeping his dark secrets about state capture.
Red flags
Soon after I rejoined Regiments, the cracks were starting to show. By May 2015, at one of our early-morning coffee chats, Wood first broached the subject of breaking away from Regiments to form Trillian.
He told me he had a black investor — he didn’t say who — who wanted to join him in buying Regiments’ advisory division and starting a new company. And here was the bombshell: he wanted me to be CEO of the new company.
I had never felt so empowered and appreciated. When I look back, I feel cold: as it turned out, what he really wanted was for me to be black and a woman, and complicit in corruption.
My understanding of what happened is that Essa and the Guptas asked themselves, “Why accept a slice when we can have the whole cake? We can take over Regiments, protect our business interests and make more money.”
In December 2015, the Regiments directors called everyone together and said Wood was leaving and that the company would be split at the end of February 2016. Wood told us we would take all the existing contracts with SOEs (Transnet, Eskom, Denel and SA Express) with us, once the negotiations were finalised.
Trillian began life on March 1 2016, and I was to be CEO of one of its critical arms, Trillian Financial Advisory.
But there were red flags everywhere. In early 2016, my team had been told to draft an “unsolicited bid” for Transnet’s fleet renewal. In February, Wood asked me to send Transnet an R11.4m invoice for the proposal. I refused, as you don’t charge for something like that. I later learnt the invoice had been sent anyway.
It soon became clear that while Trillian Management Consulting CEO Bianca Goodson, CFO Tebogo Leballo and I were registered as directors, others — notably the guys from Integrated Capital and Essa — were actually running the show.
It finally dawned on me why Wood had cherry-picked this team: we were all black or female. It was classic BEE fronting.
I was CEO in name only. As executive director, I was obliged to exercise my fiduciary duties and bear the risk of directorship, but I wasn’t making the real decisions.
Today, it’s clear to me that Wood set us all up to follow him blindly into the abyss. He created an environment where staff would believe his propaganda. In his first speech at
Trillian, he talked about our dynamic new BEE company, and how there would be negative publicity because we were shaking things up. He groomed us from day one.
On March 19 2016, Goodson resigned.
She said she’d realised Trillian was associated with the Guptas and Bobat, and that, for her reputation, she had to go.
Being associated with the Guptas was like wearing a scarlet letter. By now I was crying every night. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t enjoy my work, I didn’t enjoy my salary, I couldn’t sleep at night, I wasn’t eating.
Then, on March 25 2016, I opened the
Mail & Guardian and saw an infographic that brought my situation into sharp focus. Under the headline, “Parastatals in Guptas’ web”, there were photographs of people I knew well, detailing their role in state capture. The article was, however, missing Trillian. I realised I could fill in the blanks.
I showed the article to my partner, Vusi. “I’m being used for this machinery called state capture,” I said. “I’m a director. There’s no way that I can be associated with this. I have to find another job.”
As it was, my relationship with Wood was going downhill. On June 22, I resigned.
Once I had realised I was being used for something perverse and illegal, I left behind a R2.3m annual salary, and a R400,000 bonus that would have been paid in October.
Working for Wood was like buying a house voetstoots. You buy the beautiful house and it’s only later, when you’ve been living in it for a while, that you see the damp and the cracks that have been painted over. He put my whole future in jeopardy.
I consulted lawyer Johan Roodt, who was brutally honest: “You could go to jail. When you are an executive director, you take on certain obligations. You are obliged to report this to the authorities.”
I was terrified. I didn’t want to go to the police — I wasn’t sure I could trust them. I spoke in depth to Goodson, who said she’d experienced the same thing, and within a few days, I contacted public protector Thuli Madonsela.
On Saturday September 17, I met Madonsela at a restaurant in Pretoria. Her team was with her, working on laptops, and there was a priest with her. I introduced myself and she thanked me for coming; she told me I was very brave. She had a gentle manner; she was like a goddess to me.
I handed her the statement I’d written and spent about 20 minutes giving her a broad summary of what I’d been through. Then she asked me to take two of her investigators through the whole ordeal, step by step.
Within days, I received a text from Pillay:
“You set the cat among the pigeons. Well done for going to the public protector.”
I was astounded — clearly legal privilege had been breached. I felt violated.
Then Trillian came after me. Through Stein Scop Attorneys, the company demanded I give back any confidential information I was in possession of, and hand over my cellphone, laptop and other devices. It became all-out lawfare.
I lodged a constructive dismissal case; I knew Eric would probably try to pass me off as a disgruntled employee who had gone to the public protector to get back at him.
In October 2016, the story came out in the Sunday Times that I’d blown the whistle. Though my name wasn’t mentioned, it wasn’t hard to guess that I was the unnamed whistle-blower. My phone rang constantly, but I didn’t pick up.
I felt so vulnerable — a private person catapulted into the cesspool of state capture with the likes of Essa, Bobat and Wood. It was particularly difficult knowing that they could get away with it by simply denying their misdeeds and tarnishing my reputation.
It got worse: Trillian sued me to reclaim its R500,000 sign-on bonus, and Stein Scop told me the company would be laying criminal charges against me too.
I then got a call from Constable Moabelo from the SA police, who told me charges had been laid against me for extortion, theft and corruption, among other things. He’d been “instructed to expedite the case”, given the political connections of the people involved.
I was shaken. I would soon learn that bringing malicious and frivolous charges against whistle-blowers is a classic example of how state institutions bully and silence people. I bought a bottle of wine and poured a glass, and then another. I had never been more than a social drinker before I joined Trillian. Now I was drinking to numb my pain — the beginning of a pattern of using alcohol as a crutch.
I felt like the loneliest person in the country. I was completely isolated. No-one at Trillian supported me. No-one at Eskom came forward to say: “Yes, it’s true, we paid Trillian without a contract in place.” My faith in humanity was destroyed.
At my Commission for Conciliation, Mediation & Arbitration hearing, fictitious documents were presented. For one particular meeting they said took place, they should at least have checked their dates — they chose the only week in which Wood and I were both on leave.
While I wasn’t earning, the debts were mounting. One evening in January 2017 I opened my bill from law firm Werksmans, and saw a legal bill of R1.3m. It was crushing — which was, of course, the intention of those waging the lawfare.
Mercifully, the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa got the bill reduced and agreed to pay it. The platform’s William Bourdon, the French lawyer who has represented Edward Snowden, agreed to fund In the end, Trillian paid Stein Scop R18m to fight me — such was their level of hatred and vengeance.
The corporate cold shoulder
Professionally, however, I was out in the cold. An interview at the Industrial Development Corp went nowhere. After being interviewed by global engineering con
sultancy Mott MacDonald, I was told: “I doubt your ethics and integrity, having worked for KPMG and Trillian and Regiments.”
It was the same elsewhere. Corporates don’t like controversy. No-one would touch me. I had exposed corruption and my reward was to be shunned.
This is the most painful part of my story. I could handle the criminal charges; I could handle Wood’s lawsuits. But this broke me. I would open a bottle of chardonnay and drink, day after day, just to numb the pain.
On June 29 2017, advocate Geoff Budlender released his report “on allegations with regard to the Trillian group of companies”, which vindicated me. As Business Day put it: “The whistle-blower was right: Budlender found that in his view‚ the version of events supplied by the former Trillian CEO-turnedwhistle-blower was true.”
As 2018 dawned, the country’s prospects looked brighter; Cyril Ramaphosa had won the ANC presidency. But my depression deepened. My insomnia was terrible, and the drinking got so bad my hands shook. I went to bed at night telling God: “If this is my life now, it would be better if I don’t wake up.”
My search for work continued, but the pattern never changed: rejection after rejection. Potential employers questioned my integrity and worried about my status as a politically exposed person.
My 40th birthday was on March 16 2018. Then, a month later, good news: the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) had declined to prosecute me. It was at that time that I got a call from the FM’s then deputy editor, Sikonathi Mantshantsha, who asked how I was doing.
I told him the truth: I wasn’t surviving. I was nearly bankrupt and three months away from selling my house. I was a professional job-seeker, but no-one would touch me.
He wrote about it in the FM, under the headline “The Cost of Being Principled”.
“Whistle-blower Mosilo Mothepu took the bullet for us,” he wrote. “She is still paying for her courage.”
Mantshantsha’s article had an impact beyond anything I could have imagined. MTN’s then CEO Rob Shuter saw it, and sent a message to the company’s head of regulatory affairs saying: “Perhaps we can bring her in on a contract?”
I was offered a job, paying R3m a year, in MTN’s treasury department.
A few days later, I got another surprise. Sitting in Egypt, where I’d joined Vusi, my phone rang. “Hello, is this Mosilo Mothepu? It’s Cyril Ramaphosa.”
I sat up, sobered up and covered up. I told him the truth. “Mr President, I’m not well,” I said. “I’ve been let down by your organisation, by your administration.”
He asked if we could get together and, before he hung up, he said: “Thank you for what you did for our country.”
These were both deeply encouraging events. But it was never going to be so simple. I was diagnosed with chronic depression, chronic amnesia, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
I had no memory — I was like a threeyear-old. I couldn’t remember a life before Regiments and Trillian. I couldn’t access the memories of my childhood, the music I loved, my favourite recipes, my friends. All I had were replays of the past three years.
And they haunted me every second — I had no peace, just endless paranoia.
Every car that followed me, I thought, was former public enterprises minister Lynne Brown. Every motorbike that came up behind me was an assassin.
Through 2020, my mental state slowly improved. I was working at MTN and seeing a psychiatrist and trauma counsellor, while assisting the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture, the NPA, and the Asset Forfeiture Unit.
But I still deal with chronic depression and anxiety; I still suffer from PTSD and insomnia; I still fear for my safety.
My story has played out in the media and is well known, but what I want to impart is the wisdom and strength that I’ve received.
Every generation faces a crisis of some sort. People were exiled, imprisoned or killed to end apartheid and give us democracy. Our fight against state capture and corruption is not in the trenches or on the streets; it is in the boardroom. Without whistle-blowers bringing those dealings out of the shadows, we’d all be none the wiser. x
● This is an edited extract from Mothepu’s book Uncaptured, which goes on sale this week.
Regiments Capital has managed to stave off liquidation. In February, the high court set aside the winding-up of the company, after directors Pillay and
Nyhonyha undertook to pay all creditors not related to
Regiments in full. The NPA’s investigative directorate is reportedly still pursuing criminal charges against the company. In October 2019, the high court ordered
Trillian to pay back R600m to Eskom. It has failed to do so, and the power utility is seeking its liquidation.
Like the Gupta family, Essa is reportedly holed up in
Dubai. His lawyers last month sent a letter to the
Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture, accusing it of defamation and threatening legal action.
Mothepu testified at the state capture commission in
December and January. Pillay, Nyhonyha and Wood