The taxman cometh - or at least, his clients do

[MajGenl.Meade]

Nov 2014 Sunday Times
MZILIKAZI WA AFRIKA, PIET RAMPEDI and STEPHAN HOFSTATTER


Taxman’s rogue unit ran brothel
Secret outfit also posed as guards for ANC heavyweights, spied on top cops and acted for SARS bosses’ friends

THE South African Revenue Service’s disgraced rogue unit set up its own brothel, held meetings in a Pretoria NG Church and posed as bodyguards for top ANC politicians. These bizarre revelations about the secretive outfit are contained in a series of damning internal memos and documents written by members and ex-operatives of the unit.

The documents — seen by Sunday Times reporters — form part of the revenue service’s internal investigation of the unit’s illegal activities. Members became ANC bodyguards to infiltrate the organisation and eavesdrop on politicians. The brothel was opened in Durban where it even arranged prostitutes for other members of the unit.

The National Research Group (NRG), as the unit was called, became a law unto itself and supplied members with aliases and fake IDs. The unit probed non-tax-related matters such as taxi violence and was used to fight business battles on behalf of friends and relatives of senior SARS officials. No explanation is offered about why members were given these tasks.

The memos show the unit was also “tasked” with following three top SARS officials — Leonard Radebe, Nandi Madiba and Mandisa Mokoena — to find dirt on them and destroy their careers.

Two of them, Radebe and Mokoena, were frontrunners to succeed former SARS commissioner Pravin Gordhan, who left after the 2009 general elections. Both were subsequently discredited and forced to pull out of the race. All three were either fired or forced to resign from SARS, with Mokoena still facing a court case arising from this clandestine investigation.

Former SARS commissioner Oupa Magashula succeeded Gordhan, but later resigned under a cloud. Radebe later died in a mysterious car accident and Madiba, who was a regional manager, received an undisclosed golden handshake after initiating a legal dispute with SARS.