Tobacco Wars. Johann van Loggerenberg
their director, Adriano Mazzotti, that she was seeing me socially. According to her, he had no issue with this and wished her well. I confirmed with Mazzotti years later that this was indeed true.
I had an issue with this. Technically, nothing in law or in any SARS rules precluded me from dating a lawyer who represented taxpayers in dispute with SARS. All that I had to ensure was that I did not directly participate in any decisions or matters which would affect the client. Quite a few people at SARS are married to or date lawyers, advocates, accountants and auditors who work at firms that often engage in disputes with SARS. It is an inevitability of life. But I felt uncomfortable. I tried, in the best way that I could, to explain to Walter that if this was the case, unfortunately we would not be able to see each other socially again. ‘No, no’, she said, ‘you misunderstand me.’ She then went on to set out what she meant. She said she had felt terribly uncomfortable about being the lawyer for Carnilinx, when in fact she was actually spying on them for the Illicit Tobacco Task Team and getting paid both ways. It was a moral dilemma for her, even though she assured me it was all legal and above board, but she welcomed the opportunity to end things with Carnilinx just as she was going to end her role as spy with Burger too. I left this decision entirely up to her.
Barely two weeks or so into our dating – I was seeing her only on weekends and not during the week on account of my long working hours – I became a bit annoyed with her dilly-dallying in respect of her resignation from Carnilinx. I again reminded her that it was her decision and that I trusted her judgement, but that the indecision couldn’t go on any longer. On 16 November 2013, she sent an email to Carnilinx and SARS, and to me, in which she announced her resignation as attorney for Carnilinx.
As an aside, let me say that the SARS panel that was instituted in 2014 to investigate the relationship erred in its findings on this aspect too, as Walter would point out in an unrelated affidavit later in 2015. I was in fact notified by her on this day and not in February 2014, as the panel claimed. Importantly, at this stage Walter only represented Carnilinx as attorney, so the further claim by the panel that she represented several tobacco firms which SARS was investigating at this time was factually incorrect too.
There were two other things in those early days that Walter and I had to deal with from my side. Whereas I was initially under the impression that her role at FITA was just a ‘sideshow’ and nothing very serious, it became increasingly clear that this was not the case. So I raised this issue with her too. This time she asked me a favour. She told me that the next annual meeting of FITA was scheduled for 21 November 2013, and she did not anticipate being re-elected. She asked me just to wait until then, as she could bring about a natural end to the relationship. It seemed a fair request.
However, on the day of the AGM, she sent me a text message, stating that she had been re-elected. I immediately sent a message back, saying again that it was her choice, but we could not continue our relationship if she accepted re-election. On the same day she sent an email to all FITA members, resigning as chairperson, copying in SARS as well as me. (Again, the SARS panel I have already mentioned also missed the little fact that I had indeed received notification of her resignation on this day.) So, all in all, whatever might have been perceived conflicts for me or her were now removed as far as I was concerned. And I believed she thought the same, because she made this point in writing to a newspaper later on.23
Another issue I believed we needed to deal with was her confession to me that she wasn’t tax compliant because she hadn’t declared all her income streams, notably those as a spy. At that time nobody yet knew she was such a spy, least of all the FITA members and Carnilinx. I had given her my word to keep this a secret. At the same time, I had to somehow make sure that she became tax compliant for obvious reasons, while ensuring that her role as spy wasn’t exposed within SARS or anywhere else, partly so as not to cause harm to the Illicit Tobacco Task Team’s own operations and partly to ensure her and her family’s safety. My only solution was to take a senior manager in my division and my direct line manager into confidence. I also disclosed the relationship to two other senior managers at this point. I found one of these managers to have known of her role as spy in any event, since he had been liaising with Chris Burger on many issues. (Even here, the SARS panel got it all wrong once again – they stated that I had only declared the relationship months later in February 2014.)
Some people have asked me why I pursued the relationship. I have thought about this long and hard, trying to come up with some sort of explanation that makes sense. I suppose I was persuaded by or attracted to what I thought was her genuine honesty and her vulnerability from the start. We were both single and I was very busy at work. She didn’t seem to mind my long hours and that I was only able to see her on weekends. And there was something important I believed we had in common: we were both fighting the bad guys.
The relationship certainly started off with a few surprises, but it actually developed rather slowly since we only really saw each other on the weekends. During the week, we stayed in contact via text and phone calls. That December, she accompanied me on travels through Namibia, Zambia and Mozambique, and we came to know each other a bit better. There were two incidents, which in hindsight should have caused alarm for me, both relating to her accessing my mobile phone without my permission. One instance occurred in Namibia, and the second in Mozambique. This meant that she would have had access not only to whomever I may have been calling or been called by, but all my text exchanges with colleagues, taxpayers and their representatives, and my entire email inbox at SARS. But the way she played it, when I found out, was that of a jealous girlfriend, and that was how I experienced it. Other than that, December was, shall I say, somewhat peaceful.
Things would begin to turn for the worse in January 2014. Earlier in November, we had spent a weekend in the Cape. Upon embarking in Johannesburg, as we were queuing, all squashed up as one always is, to get to the aeroplane’s exit, she switched on her mobile phone and messages starting coming in. I couldn’t help seeing one message she had opened, which stated that a certain amount of British pounds had been paid into an account. She looked at the message, then up at me, and said to me that I wasn’t supposed to see that. She would from that point refer to the person who had sent her the message as ‘the Pom’. I didn’t understand and didn’t feel comfortable about asking, as it was still early days in the relationship.
But in January 2014, when SARS was busy auditing her undeclared income streams, she confessed to me again in greater detail about ‘the Pom’. She explained that in conjunction with the Illicit Tobacco Task Team, and with the full blessing of the state, she was also a spy for BAT plc. She never gave me the nitty-gritty of it. We had some disagreements about how this could possibly have been legal, and eventually I advised her of the need to comply with the Financial Intelligence Centre Act since she was an attorney. I couldn’t believe that as an attorney she could be so naive to think such practices would be considered lawful. But she kept on assuring me it was all above board. I didn’t accept it, but then she was the lawyer, not me. I even asked a colleague for advice and passed this on to her. Walter in turn confirmed to me that she had complied with the advice, and I accepted that.
Walter’s great difficulty with the SARS audit was that she needed to demonstrate the exact income and the periods of earning. Suddenly she found ‘the Pom’ at BAT plc headquarters less than forthcoming. She needed to prove the income source and, because BAT refused to provide her with records of this, I advised her to put everything in writing to them. And so she did. She even, at one point, wrote to Martin Potgieter, the BATSA employee and part-time member of the Illicit Tobacco Task Team and TISA representative, and to the BAT CEO, Ben Stevens, in London. She also asked me to arrange to intercept her phone calls when she planned to call ‘the Pom’ and so record them. I told her that she should rather record them herself and gave some feeble excuse why I couldn’t help her. This conversation was via text and flies against the allegation she would later make that I had been intercepting her phone calls since as far back as May 2011 in order to ‘groom’ her.
More revelations were forthcoming. The manner in which she was being paid by BAT plc appeared to be criminal. They used so-called cash passports, debit cards used by travellers into which one deposits money that can be drawn worldwide. The thing about this particular scam is that these cards weren’t in her name. So the payments made to her by way of deposits in the United Kingdom, which she then