An apparent Fidentia whistle-blower who was previously believed to be overseas may be hiding in South Africa.
|||Cape Town - An apparent Fidentia whistle-blower who was previously believed to be overseas and who owes the curators in the matter nearly R10 million may be hiding in South Africa, one of the latest curatorship reports says.
Hendrik Roelof Bam, briefly a director of Fidentia Asset Management, is being sought. Fidentia was placed under curatorship in 2007. The curators, Dinesh Gihwala and George Papadakis, are required to file regular reports on Fidentia’s financial affairs.
A report from them to the Western Cape High Court dated June last year did not mention Bam’s whereabouts, but another report at the end of last year said Bam had emigrated to Australia.
However, a recent report on the status of the curatorship as of July 31 this year then said: “It appears that Bam has not actually left the country and is ‘hiding’ somewhere. Efforts are being made to locate his whereabouts.”
According to a judgment from May last year ordering him to pay the curators about R9.8m, Bam had obtained shares in Fidentia, then sold them and was paid with money that had allegedly been stolen. Bam became the director of Fidentia on June 1, 2003 and resigned on August 11, 2003.
The judgment said: “(Bam) said that the weekend before he signed the sale of shares agreement, he went to his office at Fidentia at the insistence of his wife, who suggested he gather some evidence of suspected wrongful conduct within the Fidentia group.”
It said that after his resignation and despite suspicions that directors in the Fidentia group were committing fraud, Bam “continued to accept payment… for his shares”.
“It was only after he received all the payments that he allegedly blew the whistle,” the judgment said.
“At the time when the payments were made to (Bam), the unlawful action of paying (Bam) with investor funds may not have been known to him, but on his own evidence he knew by April 2006 that there was theft of investor funds, yet he continues to refuse to return the money paid to him.”
By the time Fidentia was placed under curatorship in 2007, four of its trusts had allegedly lost more than R1.3 billion in investments. To try to recover the money, Gihwala and Papadakis sold assets and some of this money was given to the funds’ trustees, who paid it to beneficiaries.
Earlier this year, former Fidentia head Arthur Brown was fined R150 000 (three years) by the Western Cape High Court after being convicted of two counts of fraud. He paid the fine. The Supreme Court of Appeal granted the State leave to appeal against the sentence.
The curators’ report said the appeal would probably be heard before June 30.
caryn.dolley@inl.co.za
Cape Times