JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – AUGUST 21: Atul Gupta at the launch of ANN7 news channel on August 21, 2013, in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo by Gallo Images / Sunday Times / James Oatway
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – AUGUST 21: Atul Gupta at the launch of ANN7 news channel on August 21, 2013, in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo by Gallo Images / Sunday Times / James Oatway
Another day, another #GuptaLeaks revelation capable of boiling the blood: Remember the Sun City wedding in 2013? Didn’t it look so lavish and expensive? Well, if it’s on someone else’s tab, you can really splash out!
Exposed documents reveal that the Free State government mostly covered the expenses for the “event of the millennium”, as described by the then-chief executive of KPMG Africa.
The KPMG are the key players in this, as they were the auditors of the Gupta’s Linkway Trading Ltd. They allowed their company to register the wedding as a business expense, ensuring they didn’t have to pay tax on the Free State’s generous donation.
Read: #GuptaLeaks show attempts to whip up racial tension through fake Twitter accounts
This next bit is where you can physically see hands getting dirty:
For some reason, the government gave a completely unknown company – Estina – a free 99-year lease to a 4,400-hectare farm near Vrede. Upon further investigation, they had absolutely no farming staff. Their sole ‘director’ was a mere IT Salesman.
Inexplicably, Mosebenzi Zwane was then the Free State MEC for agriculture and he’s a Vrede local. Zwane was hellbent on driving the government to invest R114m into the non-existent ‘dairy project’.
So then, let’s follow that money trail:
. On August 11, 2013, Estina transferred US$1 999 975 of the Free State government’s cash to the Standard Chartered account of the Guptas’ Gateway Limited in Dubai.
. On the same day, Gateway transferred US$1 600 000 of the Estina money to the Standard Chartered account of yet another Gupta UAE shell, Global Corporation LLC.
. The next day, August 12, Global transferred US$1 590 000 – that is the full amount it received less $10 000 – in two tranches to another Standard Chartered account: that of Accurate, the company that Linkway had invoiced for the Sun City wedding.
. That same day, Gateway transferred the balance of the funds it had received from Estina plus another $25 to round it off – US$400 000 – to Accurate’s Standard Chartered account.
. The end result of this financial three-card monte was that the Guptas’ Accurate now held US$1,990,000 of the US$1 999 975 of the Free State government’s cash, which had been transferred by Estina to Gateway the day before
Read: No responsibility – Zwane claims he’s only being implicated in Gupta Leaks because he is black
Disgraceful. The Gupta’s used their Dubai-based Accurate company to launder their dirty cash and hide the truth about its origin.
How could any legitimate government look at this and think anything but ‘illicit state capture’?
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