Twist in Wiggill’s murder
‘Dead’ man sent e-mails from ipad
TWO weeks after businessman Jeff Wiggill was shot dead, emails were sent from his iPad to his friend Tulani Mawethu’s BlackBerry, planning a meeting in Midrand.
This twist in the case has fuelled the conspiracy theory by those who knew him that Wiggill, 55, chairman of construction conglomerate First Tech, faked his death on June 19 to escape going to jail for fraud.
The spectacular collapse of Wiggill’s company First Tech is expected to be the largest corporate bond default in South Africa exceeding R925-million.
Lenders exposed to the company, including Investec Standard Bank, and the Industrial Development Corporation, stand to lose millions.
Business Times has now obtained copies of e-mails dated July 4 and 5, which were taken from the company’s server, raising questions about who sent them.
The body believed to be that of Wiggill was found on June 19. It had been shot three times in the back of the head.
E-mail correspondence from earlier this year shows that Wiggill had paid for Mawethu to come to Johannesburg from the Eastern Cape and had settled him in a flat in Midrand.
Insiders say it now seems possible that he risked a meeting with Mawethu while pretending that he was dead.
Two days after the body was found, First Strut, which traded as First Tech, applied for business rescue. A group of increasingly suspicious executives had approached Standard Bank in March and blown the whistle on more than a decade of fraud.
The company went into liquidation weeks later, costing more than 7000 people their jobs.
Talk that Wiggill had faked his death began soon after the body was found.
“A lot of the creditors believe he is in Russia,” said Leon Kapp, CEO of two First Tech and one of the whistle-blowers.
It now appears that between R500-million and R900-million of First Tech’s money cannot be accounted for. “Jeff must have got it out [of the country],” said one group head who agreed to talk off the record.
It is not known whether the banks have any evidence of money being moved offshore, but speculation is rife that they do.
Another red flag is the speed at which the body was cremated. Unnatural deaths, including murders, must be autopsied by a state coroner before the body is released to the family.
The body said to be Wiggill’s was cremated just two days after it was found. However Dr Andrew Robinson, deputy director-general of the North West’s health department, said straightforward deaths — gunshot wounds, for example — , were “usually wound up within a day or so”.
Identification of the body would have been difficult, however. The execution-style killing involved three shots to the back of his head which would have damaged his face. While there was extensive damage to the face photographs show that it was at least partly intact.
Despite speculation from some quarters, many are convinced he is dead. B
Cobus van der Linde and Arrie Snyman, two First Tech security staff who were among the first on the scene of the shooting, believe the body was Wiggill’s. They say the killing was a carefully orchestrated assisted suicide carried out by a former employee and friend, Thulani Cele.
Wiggill met Cele in the late 1990s soon after Cele was released from jail for armed robbery. Wiggill got him work at a First Tech subsidiary in Limpopo, but three weeks before the killing — by which time he must have known his fraud would be discovered — Wiggill had Cele transferred to Johannesburg.
Cele’s knowledge of guns and possibly where to get one would have made him a candidate for the shooting.
The two men met six times at Cele’s flat in Auckland Park, Johannesburg, during that time. Video footage showed Cele getting into Wiggill’s Bentley on the night he was killed.
Cele was arrested the day after the memorial — which he went to wearing the same shoes and jacket he wore on the night Wiggill was killed.
Cele was released on bail of R10 000. He has denied shooting his friend, saying Wiggill was so drunk on the night of his alleged death that he had begged to be dropped off. He said he never saw Wiggill again.
But if Wiggill was shot dead on the night of June 19, who sent the e-mails?