23 December 2005 Brett Kebble THE ENIGMA LIVES ON By Brendan Ryan

However you feel about Brett Kebble, the demise of his mining empire and his murder this year amount to the biggest news story in SA mining since, well, Barney Barnato's suicide in 1897. Barnato was the flamboyant diamond magnate and Randlord mining mogul to whom observers have time and again likened Kebble in their attempts to contextualise the latter's volatile business career and expansive lifestyle. It is an apt comparison. Both men amassed vast riches at a young age from SA mining. Both lived life to the full. Both were eventually outmanoeuvred in business dealings by their opponents and both came to a sticky end. Barnato disappeared over the side of a ship sailing from Cape Town to London. Kebble was shot in his BMW on a dark road in a leafy northern Johannesburg suburb. Many believe his murder was a carefully planned assassination rather than the "hijacking gone wrong" of the official position. The year's other big mining development - Harmony's failure to secure a multibillion-rand bid for Gold Fields - appears tame by comparison with the Kebble saga. The megamerger attempt was about men in suits fighting over money and corporate turf. The Kebble saga has these elements in spades but also involves the murky areas of corporate finance, black economic empowerment wheeler-dealing and high-level political patronage and influence-peddling. While Harmony CEO Bernard Swanepoel and Gold Fields CEO Ian Cockerill were trading insults in the press, Kebble was waging personal feuds and vendettas, using political go-betweens, private eyes, underground operatives and other shady characters in ways that served only to hasten the collapse of his empire. He ran out of cash and room to manoeuvre after losing multimillion-rand claims brought against him by DRDGold chairman Mark Wellesley-Wood and mining entrepreneur Peter Skeat. Those claims had taken years to pursue and Kebble had used every dirty trick in the book to fight off his opponents. Wellesley-Wood found himself temporarily trapped in the UK at one critical stage of his battle with Kebble. Supposed "irregularities" in his work permit gave home affairs officials reason to bar him from SA until the issue seemingly evaporated. Skeat was arrested on charges of fraud which were subsequently dropped by the state. Kebble is believed to have played a hidden role in both incidents. His patronage of ANC Youth League members and covert funding of controversial presidential candidate Jacob Zuma took Kebble into the political swirls and eddies of the ruling party. But of all the speculation surrounding Kebble's influence, one that cries out for an explanation - since it was exposed by Noseweek magazine - is how he managed to avoid paying taxes since 1993. How does someone as visibly wealthy as Kebble get away with that, especially in light of the SA Revenue Service's longstanding crusade to tighten tax compliance? Then there's the R2bn-odd apparently missing from his companies. Last week, three months after accountants KPMG started a forensic audit of former Kebble companies JCI and Randgold Exploration, the companies' new management announced it would take until at least the end of February to complete the investigation. The managers say there is evidence of "misappropriation of company assets". This could open an SA Pandora's box.

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