Mark Willcox: Sexwale’s brilliant but flawed dealmaker
He put together the BEE deals which turned it into an empowerment juggernaut and made Sexwale one of the richest people in SA. In the process Willcox had netted R300m for himself by 2004, when he was 34, becoming one of the biggest individual benefactors of BEE.
He was born in Cape Town on January 8 1970. After graduating with a BA LLB at the University of Cape Town, where he also earned a higher diploma in tax law, he worked as an investment banker in New York.
When he returned he did commercial law with future corporate crook and mining magnate Brett Kebble at Cape Town law firm Mallinicks, where the legal secretary was Judy Moon, Sexwale’s ex-wife.
His first major business deal for Mvelaphanda Holdings was the purchase of a strategic interest in the Gem Diamond Mining Corporation owned by Kebble.
Willcox met Sexwale while structuring a deal to sell him some diamond mines in Kimberley in 1998.
The qualities that made him such a brilliant dealmaker made an immediate impact. He was an extrovert, very personable, with a bit of the snake-charmer about him, highly intelligent. He could think on his feet and had the gift of the gab.
He was extremely well read and had the ability, which he used to impressive effect in negotiations, to overwhelm people with his extraordinary knowledge of events and understanding of the intersection of politics, economics and history.
He and Sexwale quickly recognised that they each had what the other most needed. Ex-Robben Islander Sexwale had the political connections that gave him access to the huge BEE opportunities that opened up when companies had to be 26% black owned. Willcox was able to capitalise on this network by bringing the technical skills necessary to turn the opportunities into lucrative deals and investments. Sexwale was the public face of the business, Willcox the moneymaker and gatekeeper.
He was able to sift through the avalanche of offers and decide what was realistic and what was not, what could be banked and what could not be banked.
When Sexwale’s enthusiasm threatened to suck him into every venture and proposal that came along, Willcox made him focus on what was achievable and would return the greatest yields. Not everyone was happy. Some felt he overcompensated for being white by encouraging them to expand their base beyond what was necessary in terms of compliance with the law.
When the empowerment vehicle Batho Bonke, of which Mvelaphanda owned 20%, was allocated 10% of Absa, he insisted on including players outside the Mvelaphanda fold, although being black owned they didn’t need to.
Some felt he was giving away value that should have been used to build Mvelaphanda to assuage a sense of guilt about being white and benefiting so hugely from BEE. Mvelaphanda sold its stake in Absa in 2012, making R265m, which it was felt was far less than they would have made.
On the other hand he gave people access to capital they wouldn’t otherwise have had. A significant number started their own businesses and became household names thanks to him.
In 2008 he became CEO of Guernseybased Africa Management Limited, a joint venture he drove with US-based Och-Ziff Capital Management Group and Palladino Holdings led by notorious businessman Walter Hennig, an old friend from his Cape Town days, because he and Sexwale wanted to get involved with mining in West Africa and the DRC to take Mvelaphanda to another level.
AML drove an aggressive growth strategy. Concerns that they’d find themselves on the wrong side of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, plus Reserve Bank rules, led to Mvelaphanda and Sexwale exiting the joint venture. Willcox stayed on as CEO.
In 2016 a US Federal probe implicated Hennig in the bribery of officials in three African countries for mining rights, which damaged the Mvelaphanda brand and Willcox’s own reputation.
Willcox’s flaw was his ego. It drove his hunger for bigger and bigger deals. “We can be dollar billionaires,” he told those in Mvelaphanda who tried to restrain him.
SA became too small for him. He wanted to benchmark himself against players on the world stage. This led to long absences from home, putting strain on his first marriage which ended in divorce.
He was in the UK for around five years after relocating when Mvelaphanda invested in a UK-listed business with oil interests in West and Central Africa, which brought him into partnership with then president Jacob Zuma’s nephew Khulubuse Zuma.
While in the UK he became part of the international jet set in the City.
When he married his second wife Erika in 2014 he arranged a private performance at Delaire Graff Estate in Stellenbosch by US star John Legend, who six months earlier had serenaded Kim Kardashian and Kanye West at their wedding in Florence.
He is survived by Erika and three children.