Love affair rocks SARS

Charges fly of illegal pillow talk and dirty tricks as chief investigator’s liaison with lawyer blows up

AN ill-advised love tryst gone sour has turned the heat on South African Revenue Service enforcement head Johann van Loggerenberg, who has led probes into tax cheats such as Julius Malema, Radovan Krejcir and the illicit tobacco industry.

Van Loggerenberg’s romantic relationship with Belinda Walter, a Pretoria-based tobacco lawyer, has ended “acrimoniously” and the sensational accusations emerging in the fallout appear to have sparked inquiries from the Hawks crime-fighting unit, state intelligence and the police.

Walter, who used to head the Fair-Trade Independent Tobacco Association — which represented smaller tobacco firms that have frequently had skirmishes with the tax authorities — has laid complaints against Van Loggerenberg with the police and SARS.

In letters between the two obtained by the Sunday Times from Walter, she levels a host of sensational allegations against Van Loggerenberg, most serious of which is that he allegedly revealed confidential taxpayer details to her — a crime under the Tax Act.

The airing of this dirty linen will be an unwelcome distraction for the tax service, which is battling to restore its credibility after its boss, Oupa Magashule, quit under a cloud last year after offering a job to an associate of convicted drug dealer Timmy Marimuthu.

With accusations piling up fast from both sides, the romantic saga also threatens to open a Pandora’s box of dirty tricks used to prop up and protect players in the lucrative tobacco industry.

The relationship itself represented a potential conflict of interest because Walter represented tobacco companies including Carnilinx — a company run by Julius Malema supporter Adriano Mazzotti — who was being pursued for tax dodging by Van Loggerenberg.

Walter’s claims are supported by what appear to be transcripts of WhatsApp text messages between her and Van Loggerenberg — again obtained by the Sunday Times from Walter — in which the pair appear to discuss at

SARS is aware of many attempts to tarnish the integrity of SARS officials

length a number of investigations headed by him.

SARS has set up a panel to probe Walter’s allegations and presumably to assess whether any of Van Loggerenberg’s investigations have been compromised.

The agency has, however, downplayed the substance of the allegations.

Van Loggerenberg’s lawyers, Dokrat, wrote a letter to Walter saying: “Our client accepts that he may have exchanged information with you concerning his work, which he believed not unusual in a normal relationship of trust such as what he believed existed between you.”

In meetings with the Sunday Times this week, Van Loggerenberg — a former apartheid undercover police agent — said Walter’s complaint was part of an extensive campaign to discredit him, driven by people who would benefit from him being sidelined at the tax authority.

“Although her initial intention may have been simply a case of trying to hurt me when I ended the relationship, her so-called complaint very soon became an instrument of a number of people with nefarious agendas,” he said.

He said the text messages that Walter provided to prove that he was breaking the rules were incomplete and out of context and had been selectively edited to present a damning picture.

“On the other hand, I have the complete record of all our interactions in forensic form,” he said — copies of which had been handed to authorities, including SARS.

Van Loggerenberg said there was a network of rogue agents in the police and intelligence services seeking to topple him.

“I am currently in the process of suing [Walter] and other individuals who used this complaint to try to discredit me and who presented and published severely defamatory statements about me and other [people], some of a very private nature,” said Van Loggerenberg.

In e-mails earlier this year to the Sunday Times, asking it not to publish details of his private life, Van Loggerenberg

said: “One cannot predict that one will fall in love or not. In this case I did. I consider this to be intensely private and I abhor being forced to explain this to anybody because of others’ and the Sunday Times’s conduct.”

Van Loggerenberg maintained then that his relationship with Walter was born out of natural human attraction and genuine caring, that the relationship had been fully disclosed to SARS and that the couple had discussed a potential conflict of interest. He insisted that he had worked at all times to ensure the relationship did not compromise his role at SARS.

This week, he said that as soon as the relationship blossomed, he had insisted that Walter end her relationship with clients he was investigating. He said he had been unaware of some of the potential conflicts when the relationship began.

SARS said it believed that Walter’s complaints “lack substance” and were part of an “attack” on the tax authority — driven by key players in the highly lucrative world of illicit tobacco smuggling.

Spokesman Adrian Lackay said SARS had “significant and credible evidence showing incidents of spying, ‘doubleagents’, dirty tricks, leaking false allegations and discrediting SARS officials by [Walter] . . . dating as far back as 2010”.

In a letter sent to all tobacco companies in November, SARS issued a stern warning to companies it said were using devious smear tactics to sideline specific individuals seeking to bring them to book.

Lackay said Walter at first did not provide details, then withdrew the complaint when pressed — something she denies.

“If [she] and connected individuals, who are peddling the same allegations to the media, would instead present SARS with credible information, SARS would treat the allegations seriously,” he said.

“SARS is aware of many attempts to tarnish the integrity of SARS officials involved in investigations . . . some of these practices were carried out with the collusion of members of the media, the legal fraternity and former and current state officials, wittingly and unwittingly.”

The saga threatens to blow the lid on far deeper networks of misinformation and dirty dealings that have been established to prop up and protect one of South Africa’s largest criminal industries.

Van Loggerenberg said he believed that once all the evidence had come out — evidence that has been given to the Hawks, the National Prosecuting Authority, SARS and the intelligence services — “I have all faith that [a campaign to discredit SARS and himself] will come out in the open”.