Zumindest scheint Brett Kebble sein Leben genossen zu haben:
Where some of the billions went
By: Barry Sergeant
Posted: '06-OCT-05 16:19' GMT © Mineweb 1997-2004
MOSCOW (Mineweb.com) --The late Brett Kebble lived life like a combine harvester running on a big fuel tank full of ether.
He owned up to nine Ferrari sports cars, depending on the time of day, and commuted between his principal mansion in Bishopscourt, Cape Town, and luxurious Johannesburg residences in one of two jets. The bigger one, a Gulfstream II, costs a cool $16 million; the smaller one, a Bombadier Learjet 45, is a snip at $6 million.
Much of Kebble’s excessive lifestyle was financed by a gigantic slush fund that found itself the subject of a Mineweb expose this week. The slush fund, a boring, virginal-sounding thing, Consolidated Mining Management Services (CMMS), is a 98% subsidiary of JCI, where Kebble was CEO for years until forced out on August 30 this year.
News of the slush fund, which came as a surprise even to some of Kebble’s closest confidants, has rattled South Africa’s financial and investment landscape. In the five years to March 31, 2003, JCI transferred R1.4 billion in hard cash into CMMS. Of that figure, R632 million in hard cash is not readily traceable on the exit side.
News of the slush fund has been awkward for some, given Kebble’s violent death on September 27. Life, however, goes on, and shareholders have inalienable rights to know what happened to hundreds of millions of rands of disappeared cash. It was worse, however. When Kebble had bled JCI to the point of virtual extinction , he turned his attention to Randgold & Exploration (R&E), where he was also CEO. 
In the past 15 months or so,like a marauding steroid-overdosed Durban cockroach[Blockierte Grafik: http://www.smiliemania.de/smilie132/00000285.gif] , Kebble staged irregular and most likely illegal transactions out of the R&E stable, raising up to R2 billion in cash. Again, to date, it has not been possible to identify the recipients of this cash, be it entity, man, woman, hyena or marabou stork.
Kebble’s previously massive sources of cash met a grisly end in the weeks before his death, when he was trying to rustle up or borrow around R5 million from people closest to him. His requests were indirect and discreet, but it was clear that he did not have a cent to rub between his fingers. This was a hell of a thing, coming from a man who needed up to R5 million a month just to stand still.
Kebble, a would-be Master of the Universe, was a master of consumption. He would gorge, ingurgitate, overindulge, glut, stuff, engorge, gormandize, binge, pig out, satiate, and scarf out. One weekend in London, he blew the equivalent of R460 000.
Most of this fatuous spending went on horrendously expensive bottles of wine (try Dom. Romanée Conti 1997, Château Valandraud Saint-Emilion 1995, Château Latour Pauillac 1990, Château Le Pin Pomerol 1999, or Petrus Pomerol 1998) and watches (try Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, and Girard-Perregaux, for starters).
On one trip heading out of London, a gluttonous Kebble popped into a shop at Heathrow and ended up buying 100 watches. But he never made it into the truly big stinky awful league of watch buyers: the record was set in 1999 when a 1933 gold Patek Phillipe with 24 complications was auctioned off by Sotheby's for $11 million.
Kebble had lots of aspirations, among which, and perhaps leading the list, was to be liked, respected and admired. Kebble, half-nerd (the piano player), half-wolf (the “mining mogul”), and dressed in sheep’s clothing, showed some talent in the way he surrounded himself with feral human beings.
Kebble never knew anything about figures (he had a bachelor of arts from his university days), so he found a man who could engineer accounts to world-class standards. That man, Hennie Buitendag, was the financial director of a number of Kebble companies, not least CMMS. Buitendag had been a director of that company (previously known as MIMIC) since 1988, when Kebble had hardly wiped his ears dry from university. Kebble also had a law degree, leaving him clueless about mining.
During the years when Kebble abused CMMS as a slush fund, Buitendag fixed all the accounts. Buitendag was also, naturally, the financial director at JCI. Kebble’s father, Roger, was in the chair, and Brett’s two close friends, John Stratton and Charles Cornwall, completed the JCI board of directors. They were all forced out on August 30 this year, when Investec effectively took control, although Brett remained on as a non-executive director. And they all acquiesced in kebble’s pillage of the company.
There was also a host of firings on August 30 at R&E, including Roger Kebble (as non-executive chairman), Brett Kebble (as CEO), Lunga Ncwana (as non-executive director) and, yes, Hennie Buitendag (as financial director).
It was these motley crews, these feral groupings, that benefited from Kebble’s activities at JCI, as to cash flooding out of the CMMS slush fund, and, in the latter period, at R&E, as cash simply flooded out.
Even at the detectable level, these scavenging individuals were paid millions and millions. At JCI, the directors received a total of R12 million in the year to March 31, 2004. This was not only an obscene amount for directors of a passive investment company, it was also double the figure paid in 2003.
Consulting and management fees, without further explanation, left JCI to the tune of R54 million, against R23 million in 2003. Here, Kebble was grotesquely milking the parent company at the public level, never mind at the CMMS level, which, to all intents and purposes, was hidden from the public eye, like dirty secrets behind a bedroom door.
Kebble’s largesse extended naturally in to his forays into black economic empowerment (BEE), where his acolytes simply had to have the best. It was a multi-million rand mansion, a sports car, a watch (Rolexes appear to be the most popular), and cigars (try Montecristo No 4, Montecristo “A,” Hoyo de Monterrey, Partagas, H Upmann, Romeo y Julieta (Cedros Deluxe, Nos 1, 2 or 3 and Deluxe Turbos), and Cohiba). Then, of course, there is the compulsory Moet & Chandon Dom Perignon, and for the most spoilt aficionados, single malt whisky (try Aberlour, The Edradour, Glenmorangie, Lagavulin, The Macallan, Oban, or Talisker).
But now the party is over. [Blockierte Grafik: http://www.smiliemania.de/smilie132/00000568.gif] Today, it is impossible to provide an even vaguely reliable financial picture of the companies where Kebble was forced out as CEO on August 30. At Western Areas, a R640 million capital raising is underway; Investec has provided a facility of up to R460 million to JCI, and R&E lies bleeding. JCI has not published audited figures since those for the year to March 31, 2004 and R&E, not since those for the year to December 31, 2003.
Perhaps the new directors at the various companies will identity and name the key recipients of the massive amounts of money siphoned out of JCI and R&E, and perhaps some of it will even be retrieved. But the outcome will be bitter, regardless of the outcome. There are also big particular questions hanging around JCI. Based on current information, as sketchy as it is, the group appears to be insolvent to the tune of around R1 billion and has been for some months by the seems of things.
There is also the simple fact of life that the hedge book (a Brett Kebble decision at the bottom of the gold cycle) at Western Areas is under water to the tune of at least $400 million. Were it not for the high quality of the South Deep gold mine (in which Western Areas holds 50%) and its very long life, Western Areas could have slipped into technical insolvency. But it will still take years for the hedge book to be settled.
Kebble, who lived life like a combine harvester running on a big fuel tank full of ether, is gone forever. Kebble Air is also gone: the Gulfstream II and the Bombadier Learjet 45 are up for sale. And many close to him have put up other properties for sale.
http://www.mineweb.net/sections/mining_finance/498455.htm
