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TJ Strydom
Christo Wiese
Risk & riches
Tafelberg
To dearest Lejanie, the one who still laughs at my jokes
1.
Baggage
‘If a man were to write such a book, a biography, he should tell the truth. And if I tell the whole truth, I’ll embarrass a whole lot of people, including myself.’
Christo Wiese in an initial discussion about this book, 2018
The Slumdog Millionaire theme song bursts over the radio at regular intervals. ‘Jai Ho! … Catch me, catch me, catch me, c’mon catch me,’ sing Nicole Scherzinger and the Pussycat Dolls on a crisp London morning. The tune has been on Britain’s top ten chart for three weeks.
The mercury won’t climb higher than 11 degrees Celsius today. It’s overcast and it looks like rain.
Christo Wiese is on his way to the airport. It takes less than an hour to get from the Ritz Hotel to the terminal. London City Airport is a favourite among business travellers. It’s much closer to the City than Heathrow or Gatwick and has an expedited procedure at the check-in counter.
Wiese wants to catch an early flight to Luxembourg, returning the same day. It’s a Monday in April and at the weekend he attended a wedding in Russia. His flight to Moscow was booked so as to give him the chance of casting his vote in Cape Town in South Africa’s general elections before departing.
‘I have no reason to believe that Jacob Zuma would do a worse job than anyone else,’ the Sunday newspaper Rapport quoted him as saying.1 Whether his vote was one of the 11,6 million cast that gave Zuma and the ANC a comfortable majority in the 2009 election is his secret. Other business leaders are worried about the new man on his way to the Union Buildings, but Wiese is ever the optimist. ‘What possible advantage is there in being negative? I know our country has problems. All countries do, and you are surely better equipped to handle the challenges and problems where you live and know the territory.’
Today, he is entering uncharted territory.
A customs official searches Wiese’s hand luggage and finds it stuffed full of banknotes. It’s a stash of £120 000 (at the time worth more than R1,5 million) in used £50 and £20 notes. The official questions him about the bonanza.2
It’s from a safety deposit box at the Ritz Hotel, he explains, but until the end of last year it was in a strong box with UBS, a bank, here in London. On the form the official hands him to fill in, he notes that he is carrying the money to keep in safe storage. Wiese also provides a contact number for the relevant person at UBS and gives the details of his accountants.
A while later the officials go through Wiese’s checked-in baggage and discover more notes, some in a poor state, bundled together and bound with elastic bands. They estimate the find at between £400 000 and £500 000. The actual amount is £554 920 (another R7 million).
Now why didn’t he declare this money on the form he had just filled in?
No, he thought they were only asking about the money in his hand luggage.
Wiese explains to the officials that he is a regular visitor to the United Kingdom. He tells them that his company Pepkor has four thousand stores that sell a variety of goods. The money they see here in his suitcases is from South Africa and is the proceeds of diamond deals in the 1980s and 1990s. The money was taken out of his home country in the form of travellers’ cheques and had been cashed abroad and then stored. Owing to South Africa’s foreign exchange controls at the time, the money was taken either to Britain or Switzerland. And now he is on his way to Luxembourg to invest the money there or open an account.
Then why keep the money in a strong box all this time and not in a bank?
He didn’t want to leave an audit trail, as previously in South Africa one was not allowed to keep money offshore. By keeping it in strong boxes there would be no paper trail, he tells the officials.
Wiese is polite and gives his cooperation throughout the questioning. He can go. But his money stays behind in the United Kingdom. The authorities apply to have it forfeited to the state.3 To them this stash of notes looks as if it was laundered.
2.
The retailer
‘It’s always been in my family.’ 1
Christo Wiese when asked about ‘retail’ in an interview, 2015
The life of a soldier in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was no picnic. You had to undertake long voyages, on rough seas and in appalling conditions. It was a dangerous business. You would sail around the Cape of Storms to reach far-distant islands in the Indian Ocean. You served in inhospitable places where tropical diseases threatened your life. And you battled through oppressive humidity and temperatures at least 10 degrees hotter than in Holland at its worst.
For Europeans, you usually only worked for the Company as a sailor or soldier if you had no other choice. Or perhaps if the family business was not something you could see yourself being tied to for the rest of your life.
This is what the young Benjamin Wiese did in 1712. He borrowed money from his father, Benjamin senior, and joined Captain Jan van der Merkt of the Arion, a ship with a crew of 158 that could carry a cargo of 630 tonnes. He made it to the Cape of Good Hope, where he spent five weeks, and then sailed onwards to Batavia, or what is now Jakarta, in Indonesia.
A year later and he had had enough. Wiese found his way back to the Cape and left the service of the VOC as a soldier, staying on in the colony as a free burgher. His timing was both good and bad. Good, because in 1714 the Arion disappeared in the South China Sea en route to Japan. Bad, because a smallpox epidemic was then ravaging the Cape. Wiese was also felled by disease, though it is not clear whether it was the smallpox or another ailment. But it was serious enough for him to draw up a will, which reveals that he had no dependants at this stage.
Wiese recovered and married a young widow, Hester Mostert, early in 1714. Together they had three sons. In the year of his youngest son’s birth, Benjamin left the Cape, having struggled to find work. He also wanted to attend to his deceased father’s estate in Amsterdam.
Hester followed him a few years later, leaving their sons in the care of the local Orphan Chamber. Whether she or Benjamin ever made it back to the Cape is difficult to ascertain. But they did come together in Amsterdam, as they registered the birth of a daughter there in 1728.
Pieter Wiese, the only one of the three sons with recorded descendants, followed in his absent father’s footsteps, doing a stint as sailor for the Company. But after marrying Margaretha Swart in Stellenbosch, he decided that agriculture was possibly a better life for him. In 1743 he got permission to let his sheep graze at Vaderlandscherietkloof (Dutch Reed Kloof) in the Piquetbergen. To secure the right, he was obliged to put down 24 rix dollars within a month of signature and thereafter pay the Company the same amount annually. In 1748 he also obtained permission to let his sheep graze on a piece of land next to the Holle River. Pieter, it seems, used what money he had for other purposes than settling his debts with the authorities. By 1754 he had already fallen four years in arrears with his annual payments.
And for some time it seemed that the Wiese line might stop right there. Margaretha bore Pieter four daughters before Petrus Benjamin was born in 1751.
While the Industrial Revolution was transforming Britain into a modern commercial and industrial society, the Cape economy still mainly revolved around farming and trading. Apart from children, very little else was produced on the southern tip of Africa.
Petrus Benjamin tied the knot with Isabella Loubser before he was 19 and together they had ten children. The youngest, Tobias, was born in 1791. As a child he experienced the last years of Dutch rule at the Cape. Britain annexed the settlement in 1795 during the French Revolutionary Wars to prevent France from taking control of the strategic trading post. By this time the colony