Roger Kebble: Mine magnate ensnared by son’s dodgy deals
1939-2015
ROGER Kebble, who has died at the age of 75 after shooting himself in Bishopscourt in Cape Town, would have been unknown and pretty much unremembered if it hadn’t been for the fact that his son Brett was the greatest crook in South African corporate history.
Brett, a multitalented, dazzlingly articulate and intelligent lawyer, created a bogus mining empire built on charm, lies, monumental fraud and massive debt.
Roger, made of rougher stuff altogether, was a hard-core, hard-talking miner who thought his piano-playing son was a bit effeminate and teased him mercilessly about it (“My second daughter,” he’d sneer). Compared with Brett he was a philistine of simple tastes (but increasingly expensive appetites) who spent the best part of 15 years underground in a string of Anglo American gold mines on the Rand and in the Free State.
He introduced Brett to the world of mining but Brett was more interested in boardroom intrigue than actual mining. He ensnared the largely uncomprehending former shaft boss in an intricate web of deceit and made him a party to his crimes.
For six years in the late ’90s and early 2000s they were the most formidable, feared, corrupt, corrupting, connected (former national police commissioner Jackie Selebi was an assiduously courted dinner guest) and fawned-over pair in South African mining.
On August 24 2005 their world came crashing down when Brett was made to step down as CEO of the three listed mining companies on which his “fortune” depended, and Roger was ejected as chairman. Roger ended his life 10 years later to the day. Brett was pumped full of bullets on September 27 2005 in what was called an “assisted suicide”.
Roger Kebble was born in Springs on the East Rand on November 9 1939. He matriculated at St Andrew’s School in Bloemfontein. His parents wanted him to study accounting, but he wasn’t interested in university. He just wanted to be a miner.
He went straight underground and worked his way up to shift boss and mine captain.
He drank Black Label with his men in the shebeens on Sunday afternoons and came to reminisce about those days with great nostalgia.
He became a general manager and worked out that using the mine’s own labour force was more expensive and less efficient than bringing contractors in to do the job.
And so he left the mines and started his own mine contracting company with around R10 000 from his mother.
He grew it into a substantial business, bought a table grape farm in Simondium, near Paarl, in the Western Cape and in the ’80s sold out to Gencor, leaving him comfortably well off.
He went into early retirement in Cape Town and got involved with a fencing company.
In the early ’ 90s he jumped at an opportunity to purchase Rand Leases, a small, 65-year-old dog of a gold mine west of
EXPENSIVE TASTES: Roger Kebble rose from humble shift boss to top of the mining pile Johannesburg, for 1c a share. He brought his bright, newly articled lawyer son in with him.
Within a year the share price had gone up to R1. The R40 000 he’d paid was suddenly worth R4-million, which, as Brett was not slow to see, gave them a decent balance sheet to play with.
Soon afterwards London-based investment company Mercury Asset Management injected them into Randgold & Exploration, where it was a substantial shareholder, to save its mines from being closed. The Kebbles organised an acrimonious takeover, unbundled the mines into three listed companies — Harmony, DRDGold and Randgold Resources — and began gouging.
Roger became executive chairman of DRDGold and used shareholders’ money to fund Brett’s nefarious wheeling and dealing, as well as for his own personal benefit.
In 2000 Mercury sent Englishman Mark Wellesley-Wood to DRD to improve corporate governance. Soon afterwards Roger was forced to step down but persuaded Wellesley-Wood to make him executive deputy chairman.
He waited for Wellesley-Wood to leave South Africa on business, then retaliated by getting his contacts in the Department of Home Affairs to withdraw his work permit, declare him a prohibited immigrant and deny him re-entry.
He even got the director-general to announce with glorious but of course unintended irony that Wellesley-Wood was “the kind of executive South Africa can do without”.
From London, Wellesley-Wood issued an order prohibiting Roger from carrying out any executive functions on behalf of DRD, banning him from the premises and from contacting any employees or contractors.
In 2002, Roger was arrested at what was then Johannesburg International Airport, charged with 62 counts of fraud and jailed for the night. In 2005, after more than a dozen court appearances, in which he was represented by Oscar Pistorius’s saviour Advocate Barry Roux, the case was struck from the roll. But it was the source of a battle with the taxman that was still ongoing at the time of his death. He was due to appear in court next year.
He liked to project the image of a ’lovable rogue’ but to those who blew the whistle on him or otherwise got in the way, he was nasty, ruthless and intimidating
Roger Kebble may not have understood half of what Brett was up to. But he would have had to be an idiot not to have a very good idea of the other half.
He certainly had no compunction about disporting himself like an emperor on the proceeds.
He projected the image of a “lovable rogue” but to those who blew the whistle on him or otherwise got in the way, he was nasty, ruthless and intimidating. He could be a father figure one minute and want your head the next.
He didn’t for a moment believe that Brett’s death was an “assisted suicide” as found by a court. He died believing that Brett, with whom his relationship was as strained as it was mutually beneficial, had been murdered to keep him from spilling the beans on those involved more deeply and in more serious criminal acts than he was.
But when crime boss Glenn Agliotti was tried for Brett’s murder Roger refused to testify.
Roger Kebble, who had been suffering from depression, is survived by his son Guy, a former Springbok rugby player, and daughter Alison.
He and his former wife, Julie, were divorced three years ago. — Chris Barron