Former Fidentia investors believe J Arthur Brown did not steal their money and now plan to take the curators to court.
|||Cape Town - Former Fidentia investors believe J Arthur Brown did not steal their money and now plan to take the curators to court, saying they have their money.
Theft charges were withdrawn against Brown, but he was convicted of two counts of fraud.
Ex-mineworkers representative, Edwin Thembalinkosi Shibani, said no payments had been paid to the more than 500 miners who invested with the Living Hands Trust since Fidentia was placed under curatorship on February 1, 2007.
“The curators said they paid them – unfortunately they did not pay them at all. The people want to protest about this issue. Their children are suffering. They did not get relief while the case was pending. They are very, very angry indeed. I’m blaming the curators and not Mr Brown,” Shibani said.
Another investor, Masnoena Philander of Philippi, said her late husband had invested more than R70 000 with Living Hands.
One of her daughters had received a R24 000 payout but her two other children, now 23 and 26, were still owed R50 000.
“My children dropped out of school because there was no money for clip cards and so on. I relied on Fidentia to pay the school fees every year. In some way my children’s lives have been messed up,” Philander said. Of the fine that was imposed on Brown for fraud, Philander said: “I feel happy because he is prepared to help us get the money. As I see it he isn’t the one who took the money.”
Dudley Johnson, 70, of Athlone who worked for SA Nylon Spinners, invested his R200 000 retirement fund with Antheru in 2004.
Antheru is one of the companies that invested with Fidentia. Brown was initially charged with defrauding the company of about R40 million but this count was withdrawn this year.
“I haven’t been paid a cent. We got our money until the FSB walked into Arthur’s offices and closed it down. Arthur paid us right until the very end.
“But when the curators took over we never got a cent. I’m suffering because you can imagine getting R3 000 a month and now getting nothing. It baffles me why the curators have taken so long to pay out the beneficiaries,” Johnson said.
On Wednesday, a visibly exhausted Brown emerged from the Western Cape High Court and said he was on a mission to “get the truth out”. He would not rest until all former miners, widows and pensioners – who had invested through Fidentia – were paid out.
He would pursue criminal charges, civil actions and do forensic audits to recover the lost money, he said. “I’ve made a promise to these people. They’ve seen what the truth is and now the job needs to get done and until that’s done I’m not going to rest.
“The court has given me an opportunity to rectify this thing and I will use every waking hour to do it... I will only be free once I have sorted the investors out.”
Cape Argus