Fidentia auction too little, too late for widow
FATE and Fidentia Group founder Arthur Brown have stripped Joyce Dayimani of hope.
Her husband, a miner, died of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis and their only child committed suicide in 2013.
Now Dayimani’s priority is to erect a decent tombstone on her son’s grave, which lies amid heaps of windswept sand in Khayelitsha Cemetery in Cape Town.
But that seems a distant dream for the 48-year-old cleaner, whose R2 900 monthly income is eaten up by transport, food and clothing.
Dayimani’s woes, and those of another 60 000 widows and orphans of mineworkers, started more than a decade ago when Brown took control of the Living Hands Umbrella Trust, which was responsible for making monthly pension payments to them.
More than R1-billion disappeared and the saga culminated in Brown being sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment for fraud.
Dayimani, who believes she will never see a penny of her husband Mthandeni Ngubane’s pension, said their 23-year-old son, Mxolisi, had taken his life because he could no longer bear their life of poverty.
On Thursday in the Paarl winelands, about 45km from Dayimani’s shack, Fidentia’s last asset, the Santé Hotel and LEFT BEHIND: Joyce Dayimani and her granddaughter Emihle have no expectations that the auction of the last Fidentia asset will change their lives Spa, will be auctioned.
Jonathan Smiedt, CEO of auctioneer ClareMart, said about 100 would-be buyers had expressed interest in the hotel, spa, conference centre and three villas, advertised as having “sweeping views of the Simonsberg mountains”.
“The turnout will be good. We have had private individuals and investors in estates coming to say ‘we are going to bid on everything’,” he said.
Brown told the High Court in Cape Town in 2008 that the resort was worth R350-million and had a turnover of R4.5-million a month before it had been closed by Fidentia’s curators. EMPTY HANDS: Most of the proceeds of the sale this week of the Santé Hotel and Spa in the Paarl winelands will go to the Living Hands Trust GUILTY: Arthur J Brown was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment for fraud
But this is cold comfort for Dayimani, who said she could not remember how many times she had phoned the administrator appointed by the Living Hands trustees in an attempt to secure a payout.
“I am surprised that Fidentia still had an asset,” said Dayimani, who is raising Mxolisi’s five-year-old daughter, Emihle.
“I don’t know what difference this auction will make in my life. My son would be still alive if his father’s pension had been paid to us.
“I could no longer afford to clothe him or send him to school and he struggled to find a job. One day I returned from work and found him unconscious. He had overdosed on my blood pressure tablets.”
John Levin, one of the curators, said Fidentia had bought Santé Hotel & Spa for R117million. The trust is Fidentia’s biggest creditor, due 89.6% of whatever can be recovered.
The curators are “disengaging” from the trust and have proposed that the Mine Workers’ Provident Fund be made a trustee.
“The trust is sitting with quite a lot of money that it will distribute to widows and orphans but it is having great difficulty tracing people,” Levin said.
“We took the view that if there is anybody who has real interest it’s the [Mine Workers’ Provident Fund]. We are busy negotiating that.”
The trust, which is being managed by trustees Xola Stemela and Wilna Lubbe, comprises 400 different trusts with close to 60 000 beneficiaries from southern African countries. To date, more than 26 000 beneficiaries have been traced and paid R31million.
“Upon payment to the trust of its allocation by the curators, the funds will be distributed to the beneficiaries,” the trustees said.
“The distribution in the context of the number of beneficiaries and available funds is nominal indeed.”