John Bredenkamp: Sanctions buster and arms dealer 1940-2020
A key player in SA’s arms scandal, he often sold weapons to both sides of a conflict at the same time
● John Bredenkamp, who has died in Harare at the age of 79, was a notorious South African-born sanctions buster, arms dealer and key player in SA's arms deal scandal.
He supplied the weapons that kept wars going in Africa and the Middle East, everything from landmines to rocket launchers, anti-aircraft guns, helicopters and fighter jets, often to both sides of a conflict at the same time.
He was allegedly the biggest supplier of arms in the Congo civil war.
According to an acquaintance “money became his god”. He was listed as the 33rd richest person in the UK with a £720m fortune and a home in Berkshire.
His career on the dark side began with sanctions busting for Ian Smith’s illegal Rhodesian regime. He sold Rhodesian tobacco to Europe in defiance of international sanctions following Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence.
He used the proceeds to purchase munitions and military equipment which almost certainly prolonged Smith’s bush war against the armies of Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe.
Twenty years later he kept Mugabe’s armed forces supplied with military equipment in defiance of sanctions imposed by the European Union.
Codename ‘Peptic’
He purchased oil and military equipment for the apartheid government in the 1980s. He agreed to purchase 20,000 flame-throwers for the South African Defence Force at the request of state arms procurement agency Armscor, whose officials referred to him by the codename “Peptic”.
The deal was scuppered when the plane he chartered in Egypt to fetch the flame-throwers from the Belgian manufacturer wasn’t allowed to take off because of an unpaid fee. A second attempt, in 1983, to get the flame-throwers to SA was scuppered when the UK suspected they were being sent to Argentina, with which they were at war in the Falklands, and asked Belgium to intercede.
While Bredenkamp was bolstering the apartheid regime he was also funding Mugabe’s Zanu-PF.
In the 1990s he was involved in the post-apartheid South African arms deal scandal, facilitating the payment of “commissions” by global arms manufacturers to ANC government officials in return for lucrative contracts.
He met defence minister Joe Modise in SA when the arms companies were vying for contracts.
One of them was British arms dealer BAE Systems, which was interested in supplying Gripen and Hawk fighter and trainer jets. Bredenkamp was their highest-paid agent. According to Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO), his advice to BAE was to identify the key decision-makers with a view to “financially incentivising” them to make “the right decision”.
The SFO heard that Bredenkamp’s team had been speaking to Chippy Shaik, chief of acquisitions, about the contract, which was subsequently awarded to BAE at a cost to SA of $2.5bn, although the South African Air Force had rejected the planes as vastly overpriced and unsuited to SA’s requirements.
The SFO calculated that about £40m (R600m at the time) was paid to his company, Kayswell Services, which was domiciled in the Virgin Islands tax haven.
He also represented the Italian arms company Agusta, which was given a lucrative contract to supply helicopters.
The Scorpions said at the time that there was “at the very least a reasonable suspicion” that Bredenkamp had used money “to induce or reward officials involved in the evaluation of the various bids”.
According to a 1994 British TV documentary, one of his companies, Casalee, which was at the heart of the international arms trade, sold landmines to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, which during the subsequent Gulf war killed and maimed British soldiers, and anti-aircraft guns to Iran.
Congo ‘plunder’
He was at the centre of the Congo network which between 1998 and 2003 arranged Zimbabwean army and air force support for Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) president Joseph Kabila against Uganda and Rwanda-backed rebels. In return, Kabila gave them lucrative mining concessions and preferential trade in diamonds, cobalt and other minerals. The war left the Zimbabwean fiscus in ruins.
A 2002 UN report named Bredenkamp alongside Zimbabwean officials, including his friend the then minister of justice Emmerson Mnangagwa (whose daughter held her wedding at the Borrowdale Brooke Golf Course co-owned by Bredenkamp) as major beneficiaries from the “plunder” of the DRC’s raw materials. It was estimated that R35bn ended up in Harare and Kinshasa.
The report described Bredenkamp as someone who “actively seeks business using high-level political contacts”.
The London-based newsletter Africa Confidential wrote: “On a continent where businessmen progress through a combination of hard-nosed pragmatism and personal networks, Bredenkamp is in the premier league.”
As well as trading and trafficking in oil, arms, diamonds, cobalt and other minerals using a sophisticated web of companies based in offshore tax havens, Bredenkamp went into sports management. His clients included Zimbabwean pro golfer Nick
Price and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
Family murder
Bredenkamp was born in Kimberley in 1940. The family moved to Rhodesia where his father became a tobacco farmer and fell on hard times. When Bredenkamp was in his teens he came home to find that his father had shot his mother, sister and himself. His sister survived.
After attending Prince Edward School in Harare he captained the Rhodesian rugby team, married and had three children.
His first job was with the international tobacco company Gallaher, which sent him to the Netherlands in 1968.
In 1976 he set up the Casalee group of companies in Belgium, which bought and sold tobacco and took an increasing interest in the arms market. Meanwhile, it became the biggest non-US leaf tobacco company. He sold it in 1993 to known CIA front company Universal Corporation for $100m.
It was speculated that the reason charges were never brought against Bredenkamp was that he operated with the tacit approval of British and American intelligence organisations.
The US Treasury froze his assets in the US in 2008, designating him as one of three “Mugabe regime cronies” whose financial and logistical support “enabled Robert Mugabe to pursue policies that seriously undermine democratic processes and institutions in Zimbabwe”.
In the same year Standard Bank blacklisted him and closed his accounts after “inquiries” revealed activities including sanctions busting, arms dealing, “trafficking cigarettes” in Zimbabwe and SA, evading customs and excise duties and “defrauding Sars”.
In 2010 the South African Supreme Court of Appeal upheld Standard Bank’s decision.
Bredenkamp and 18 of his companies were blacklisted by the European Union in 2009.
He died of suspected kidney failure..